books Quotes

“Books! And cleverness! There are more important things! — Friendship! And Bravery!”

“I checked this out weeks ago for a bit of light reading.”

“Honestly, don’t you two read?”

“Run like you have to get to the library.”

“No,” said Hermione shortly. “Have either of you seen my copy of Numerology and Gramatica?” “Oh, yeah, I borrowed it for a bit of bedtime reading,” said Ron, but very quietly.”

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

“A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.”

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

“Now and then, in this workaday world, things do happen in the delightful storybook fashion, and what a comfort it is.”

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

“But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

“A book is just like life and anything can change.”

“His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.”

“Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t.”

″[To Kill a Mockingbird] is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.”

“Sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”

“I like to read books twice.”

When he gave me the book, Bill said, ‘Be skeptical about this one. It’s a great book. But try to be a filter, not a sponge.‘”

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.”

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“She didn’t care about the food. . . . It was the book she wanted. . . . She wouldn’t tolerate having it given to her by a lonely, pathetic old woman. Stealing it on the other hand, seemed a little more acceptable. Stealing it, in a sick kind of sense, was like earning it.”

“I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.”

“No, thank you. I have enough books at home. Maybe another time. I’m rereading something else with my papa. You know, the one I stole from the fire that night.”

“Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.”

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

“If there was one thing about Liesel Meminger, her thieving was not gratuitous. She only stole books on what she felt was a need-to-have basis.”

“People come, people go—they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.”

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

I have always enjoyed reading, but I’ve never been sure how to select appropriate material. There are so many books in the world--how do you tell them all apart? How do you know which one will match your tastes and interests?

“These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.”

“I’m afraid I’ve degenerated into a bibliophile.”

“So now books were her only friends. She’d read Lord of the Rings so often she could recite whole scenes by memory. “It was not a skill that aided one in becoming popular.”

“There is much you can learn from books . . . ”

“It’s amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this book survives, his ideas live.”

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?”

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.”

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

“She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.”

“Give her books, and she would devour them and end by knowing them by heart.”

“Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through…”

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

I thanked Captain Nemo, and went up to the shelves of the library. Works on science, morals, and literature abounded in every language; but I did not see one single work on political economy; that subject appeared to be strictly proscribed. Strange to say, all these books were irregularly arranged, in whatever language they were written; and this medley proved that the Captain of the Nautilus must have read indiscriminately the books which he took up by chance.

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.

Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.

“As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy . . . the afternoon passed.”

“Francie breathed the warm air, watched the dancing leaf shadows, ate the candy and took sips of the cooled water in-between reading the book.”

“She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones.”

“She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s.”

“Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world.”

“Some of the reading had been wonderful; the Louisa Alcott books for example.”

“She planned to read all the books over again when she had finished with the Z’s.”

“Saturdays were different. She treated herself by reading a book not in the alphabetical sequence. On that day she asked the librarian to recommend a book.”

“She had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.”

“What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.”

“She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness with someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read.”

“On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.”

“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

“I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”

I believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”

“I liked my books and clouds and sunsets.”

“And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books.”

“There is no book so bad but it has something good in it.”

“There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

“We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

“With frightening suddenness he now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket. Matilda froze in horror. The father kept going. There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn’t? How dare she?”

“I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda said. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.” “You mean you’ve looked at the pictures?” “Yes, but I’ve read the books as well.”

“By the time she was three, Matilda had taught herself to read by studying newspapers and magazines that lay around the house. At the age of four, she could read fast and well, and she naturally began hankering after books.”

“Many nights I drifted off to sleep to his rumbling voice reading from a book of battle strategy. And despite myself, despite what he’d done and what he was, I came to love him. It’s just not a comfortable kind of love.”

“The best sequence is this: clothes first, then books, papers, komono (miscellany), and lastly, mementos.”

“Books: Once you have pile your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want to keep or discard each one. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it.”

“I’m much better at interpreting books and stories than I am at understanding the decisions made by living, breathing people.”

“The baby grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was two years old, and he ran all around the house. He pulled all the books off the shelves.”

“Bastian looked at the book. ‘I wonder,’ he said to himself, ‘what’s in a book while it’s closed. Oh, I know it’s full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there’s a whole story with people I don’t know yet and all kinds of adventures, deeds and battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea, or it takes you to strange cities and countries. All those things are somehow shut in a book. Of course you have to read it to find out. But it’s already there, that’s the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.’ Suddenly an almost festive mood came over him. He settled himself down, picked up the book, opened it to the first page, and began to read...”

“If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.”

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”

“If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe what-ever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life. Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.”

″‘Let us pick up our books and our pens,’ I said. ‘They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.‘”

“Peace in every home, every street, every village, every country – this is my dream. Education for every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish.”

“my heart woke me crying last night how can i help i begged my heart said write the book”

“’But do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that the earth was originally a sea, as we find it asserted in that large book belonging to the captain?’ ‘I do not believe a word of it,’ said Martin, ‘any more than I do of the many ravings which have been published lately.’”

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I came upon a certain place with a den, and I lay down to sleep. I fell asleep and dreamed. In my dream, I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face turned from his own house. In his hand he held a book, and he bore a great burden upon his back.”

“Real life is often something like books.”

The old possum’s book of practical cats

“Bruno had read enough books about explorers to know that one could never be sure what one was going to find.”

“She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”

“He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books...The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”

“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

“A dozen different plans went through his head, all wretched ones, and at last he fixed on the worst plan of all. He decided to wait till it was dark and then go back to the river and ... set out for Mount Pire alone, trusting for his direction to the line he had drawn that morning in the sand. It was a crazy idea and if he had read as many books as you have about journeys over deserts he would never have dreamed of it. But Shasta had read no books at all.”

“I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road…Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards.”

“You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm.”

“It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was lying on a reading-desk in the very middle of the room.”

“Libraries were full of ideas - perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.”

“Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

“So if you want to get to know your characters, you have to hang out with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t. You may try to get them to do something because it would be convenient plotwise, or you might want to pigeonhole them so you can maintain the illusion of control. But with luck their tendrils will sneak out the sides of the box you’ve put them in, and you will finally have to admit that who they are isn’t who you thought they were.”

“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”

“The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.”

“With each day, he felt the barriers melting. He let them melt. Because of her genuine laugh, because he caught her one afternoon sleeping with her face in the middle of a book, because he knew that she would win.”

“‘No. I can survive well enough on my own - if given proper reading material.’”

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books . . . They were my teachers and my advisors.”

“Everything I found in books that pleased me I retained in my memory, consciously or unconsciously, and adapted it.”

“When I was a little girl fairy tales were my favorite books because even before you opened them you knew how they are going to end. Happily ever after.”

“Too many scholars think of research as purely a cerebral pursuit. If we do nothing with the knowledge we gain, then we have wasted our study. Books can store information better than we can--what we we do that books cannot is interpret. So if one is not going to draw conclusions, then one might as well just leave the information in the texts.”

″ Franny literally jumped ... ‘What book?’ she said. ‘This, you mean?’

“That little book she carried all around the whole house ... is at the whole root of this whole business. ”

“Where did all those feelings go? People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?”

“I could live inside my books, each one taking me further and further away from the barred windows that held me prisoner.”

“Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers.”

“It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product.”

“Trees and bushes grow over concrete, reclaiming little pockets and corners, but even more have been cleared away. Shattered glass crunches under my feet and clouds of dust drift in the wind, but somehow this place, the picture of neglect, doesn’t feel abandoned. I know this place from the histories, from the books and old maps.”

“Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain. I don’t suppose you’ve written anything like that.”

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten. I stood on the sidewalk a nothing, a gathering of dust.”

“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”

“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”

“When you convert a good book to a film, stupid things happen.”

“There are multiple possibilities for every book.”

“It’s not what you will get out of the books that are so enriching, it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life.”

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”

“The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”

″‘The clever thieves,’ Kyle read from the book, ‘took up residence in an abandoned dress factory next door to the Gold Leaf Bank and spent weeks tunneling from its basement in to the bank vault.‘”

“This library is like a good book. You just gotta check it out!”

“Above all subjects of study, Science is conveyed, is propagated, by books, or by private teaching; experiments and investigations are conducted in silence; discoveries are made in solitude.”

“One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way.”

“We have the truth still with us. But it is not found in books, to any given extent. It has been passed along......from lip to ear.”

“Our new dog, named for the beloved poet, ate a book which unfortunately we had left unguarded.”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“Paul explained these engravings to Félicité. It was the only book learning she had ever received. ”

“My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. ‘I feel let down sometimes. The people in books—the heroes—they’re always so… heroic. And I try to be, but…‘”

“People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren’t that way ... and I feel, well… hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn’t that way?”

“Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is a writer, some are written in the books and some are confined to hearts.”

“Why isn’t real life like book life?” I asked, sitting down next to him. “Why aren’t people plain and uncomplicated? Why don’t they do what you expect them to do, like characters in a novel?” I took my shoes and stockings off and dangled my feet in the water, too.

“You have to go after him! I want him brought in ... and I want him brought in by the book!”

“When I was about eleven I had read all the books about Indians in the children’s library and was actually admitted to the stacks. I remember coming home from the library with stacks of books. And I think that’s where my life as a scholar began. I know it did.”

“Along about 1917, and right nearby was a man whose books about Indians I had been reading.”

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

″ Christine went back to books and discovered the lives of worthy women—queens, princesses, warriors, poets, inventors, weavers of tapestries, wives, mothers, sibyls, and saints.”

“The laws they make in Washington aren’t put on the books because they work well--they’re put on the books because they represent the one right way to live.”

“Books allowed me not only to travel in my imagination but to look through windows into the world of the unknown and not feel afraid.”

″‘I’ve read the first paragraph of that book,’ he said. ‘Why do you suppose I haven’t slept for a week?’ I said, ‘Well?’ and he smiled a curious, twisted smile. ‘It’s a cookbook,’ he said.”

“Go on, admit it, the book whispers its story to you at night.”

″‘If you take a book with you on a journey,’ Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, ‘an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.‘”

“To think of all the times I’ve wished I could slip into one of my favorite books. But that’s the advantage of reading—you can shut the book whenever you want.”

There’s a little bit of suspension of disbelief (LOTS of coincidences)to totally enjoy this book, but enjoy it you should.

“When he wasn’t reading, he was wandering. When most people wander, they walk. Maniac Magee ran. Around town, around the nearby townships, always carrying the book, keeping it in perfect condition.”

This book’s “net” to catch you in is that one meter in our world is about one millimeter in their world, and they live on a tree. This concept is just very original and is so intriguing.

The narration shifts throughout the book alternating between J.J. in his search for the county’s lost time and the wanderings of the new policeman in Kinvara, Garda Larry O’Dwyer. Like J.J. (and most of Kinvara it seems), the new policeman has a love for music.

“It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.”

“Big Bear settled in the Bear Chair and read his Bear Book, by the light of the fire.”

Dave McKean’s illustrations are both haunting and hilarious at the same time. The wolves are portrayed as drawings made by a child, as it is implied on the front cover of the book. The wolves are also drawn in both a frightening and humorous way throughout the book.

“My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all; Yet never a printed book withstands the urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf till you can read. O days that pass, that day will come too soon, alas!”

Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.

The book is written in second person and the point of view brings you right in to the story. Even difficult classes sit quietly and with interest. The pictures and writing both draw students into the story. The tale of the babies is sweet and everyone feels good after listening to the story.

“When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

“Caleb read and read the letter so many times that the ink began to run and the folds tore. He read the book about sea birds over and over. ‘Do you think she’ll come?’ asked Caleb. ‘And will she stay? What if she thinks we are loud and pesky?’ ”

It all starts when Jared Grace finds their great uncle’s book, ‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastic World Around You’ and the Grace kids realize that they are not alone in their new house. Now the kids want to tell their story but the faeries will do everything they can to stop them.

“With that, Miyax became Julie. She was given a cot near the door in Martha’s little house and was soon walking to school in the darkness. She liked to learn the printed English words in books, and so a month passed rather happily.”

“So Cinders read her little book, The Postman drank champagne Then wobbled off On his round again (and again and again – Oops!)”

“When we picked up my dad at his office he said that I couldn’t play with his copying machine, but I forgot. He also said to watch out for the books on his desk, and I was careful as could be except for my elbow. He also said don’t fool around with his phone, but I think I called Australia. My dad said please don’t pick him up anymore. ”

“There is a difference. That book is for true healers. Men of age and wisdom. There is more in there than even an apothecary knows. More than an apothecary should know.”

“I bet you don’t know anyone else called Elsa. There was just this lion called Elsa, years ago. There was a book written about her, and they made a film. They sometimes show it on the television so maybe you’ve seen it. My mum called me after Elsa the lion. I was a very tiny baby, smaller than all the others in the hospital, but I was born with lots of hair. ”

“I bet you don’t know anyone else called Elsa. There was just this lion called Elsa, years ago. There was a book written about her, and they made a film. They sometimes show it on the television so maybe you’ve seen it. My mum called me after Elsa the lion. I was a very tiny baby, smaller than all the others in the hospital, but I was born with lots of hair. ”

“Women are books, and men the readers be...”

″‘Oh, I’ll work for nothing! Don’t you worry about the money side. I haven’t got any, either. Don’t think another thing about it. A bite of lunch and a free run of the books you’ve got in stock.‘”

“We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passion of the world bound in leather and vellum.”

“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.”

“Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.”

“Sitting in his armchair in his small house at the other side of the wood, he laughed and laughed every time he thought about all the people he had tickled. So, if you are in any way ticklish, beware of Mr Tickle and those extraordinary long arms of his. Just think. Perhaps, he’s somewhere about at this very moment while you’re reading this book.”

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

“The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.”

“I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.”

“Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life; that I am in love with both my lost best friend and my boyfriend and I need to believe in another life.”

“We can’t curl up on our couches, read the pages of a book, pray, and simply will our minds to change. God is concerned not only with the posture of our hearts but also with the people on each of our arms. In terms of fulfilling our mission in this life, we can’t do anything worthwhile alone.”

“A woman in an ugly black dress stood before them. ‘I am your new teacher, Miss Viola Swamp.’ And she rapped the desk with her ruler. ‘Where is Miss Nelson?’ asked the kids. ‘Never mind that!’ snapped Miss Swamp. ‘Open those arithmetic books!’ Miss Nelson’s kids did as they were told.”

“One day I looked at Gat, lying in the Clairmont hammock with a book, and he seemed, well, like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.”

″‘Lucky boy,’ Ashoke remarks, turning the beautifully sewn pages. ‘Only a few hours old and already the owner of books.’ What a difference, he thinks, from the childhood he has known.”

“My favourite books got happily-ever-afters— why couldn’t I?”

“I tossed one book onto the fire at a time, slowly, so Horst wouldn’t see me standing around doing nothing. My skin crawled, as if I was consigning little bits of my soul to the fire with each book I threw in. But like smiling at a Nazi dinner party or memorizing facts about the Nazis for tests in school, it was all about the bigger mission. It was all part of the game. If it meant them letting me stick around to steal their secrets so the Allies could win the war, I’d burn every last book in Berlin.”

“They searched among the pews, looking under the seats, lifting hassocks, moving piles of hymn-books, creeping about and popping up in unexpected places. Reverend Timms did find something, but it was not Sarah-Ann. It was a lady’s glove.”

“O sir, we quarrel in print, by the book, as you have books for good manners. I will name you the degrees.”

“I even presume to sit at his desk while I write this book, hoping some magical transference will take place and I’ll be gifted, if only for this moment, with his way with words. I feel like a boy trying to fit into his dad’s running shoes.”

“Whenever I picked one of them up, I would be struck by how perfectly they symbolized exactly what I resented about that bookstore. I was going to travel the world by actually traveling it.”

“Please Mrs Butler This boy Derek Drew Keeps copying my work, Miss. What shall I do? Go and sit in the hall, dear. Got and sit in the sink. Take your books on the roof, my lamb. Do whatever you think”

“She looked into this book and she looked into that. There was magic for thin and magic for fat, and magic for tall and magic for small, but the magic she was looking for wasn’t there at all.”

“That is not English, Will. And when we speak to one another, you and I, we do not use English. We use the Old Speech. We were born with it in our tongues. You think you are speaking English now, because your common sense tells you it is the only language you understand, but if your family were to hear you they would hear only gibberish. The same with that book.”

“If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school- with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses- then I am a happy man.”

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t even be worth reading.”

“when i had no friends i reached inside my beloved books & sculpted some out of 12 pt times new roman.”

“Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden.”

“Books should be found in every house To form and feed the mind; They are the best of luxuries ‘Tis possible to find. For all the books in all the world Are man’s greatest treasure; They make him wish, and bring to him His best, his choicest pleasure.”

“I’m not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.”

“There was something disconcerting about a book that had her own name on it, that no one ought to have written except herself, and yet that she had not written. Nor was her name now her property alone.”

“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

“There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.”

“His father hoped everything, and forced him to live in his books; and, when the child had reached the age of ten, saw the end of his hopes.”

″‘But in my book he doesn’t get Red Riding Hood,’ said Polly. ‘Her father comes just in time to save her.’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t in my book!’ said the wolf. ‘I expect mine is the true story, and yours is just invented.‘”

“The nonfiction books he tried were mostly called things like “When I Was a Boy in Greece,” or “Happy Days on the Prairie”—things that made them sound like stories, only they weren’t. They made Mark furious. ‘It’s being made to learn things not on purpose. It’s unfair,’ he said. ‘It’s sly’”

″ ‘I’m not up to everything, Peterkin, as you’ll find out ere long,’ replied Jack, with a smile; ‘but I have been a great reader of books of travel and adventure all my life, and that has put me up to a good many things that you are, perhaps, not acquainted with.’ ”

“I’ve seen a lot o’ fellows that were always poring over books, and when they came to try to do anything, they were no better than baboons!”

“At School Five little Girls, sitting on a form, Five little Girls, with lessons to learn, Five little Girls, who, I’m afraid, Won’t know them a bit when they have to be said. For little eyes are given to look Anywhere else than on their book; And little thoughts are given to stray Anywhere-ever so far away.”

“You can’t do half the things yourself that children in books do, making models or so on. I wonder why?”

“I love the way library books smell: more important than regular books, a grand olden-days smell, like the steps of a marble palace, or a senator.”

“Reaching in, he grabbed another book and dragged a finger across the cover. “This one’s good, too.” His large eyes blinked up at me. “You have good taste.”

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ‘They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.’

These companions”—and he laid his hand on some of the books—“have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure.

Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her.

“But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak.”

“What’s the good of talking about it at all, if it comes to that?” “What, indeed?” said Antony, and to Bill’s great disappointment they talked of books and politics during the meal.

The library was worth going into, passages or no passages. Antony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

“But I’ve most of them written on my brain and printed in my heart, and you cannot deprive me of those!”

“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“Money. You make them raise all they can, off’n their friends; and after you’ve kept them a year, if it ain’t raised then you kill them. That’s the general way. Only you don’t kill the women. You shut up the women, but you don’t kill them. They’re always beautiful and rich, and awfully scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take your hat off and talk polite. They ain’t anybody as polite as robbers—you’ll see that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and after they’ve been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that you couldn’t get them to leave. If you drove them out they’d turn right around and come back. It’s so in all the books.”