HMT Quotes

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.   - Terry Pratchett -

Maybe Heaven will be a library. Then I will be able to finish my to-read list.   - Kellie Elmore -

Books have a way of finding their way into our lives, usually, right when we need them the most.   - Richard Denney -

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.   - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. -

Have you thought of an ending?'   - J.R.R. Tolkien -

A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch,' Carrot drew himself up proudly, 'because someone's taken a   - Terry Pratchett -

Human sympathy has its limits.   - F. Scott Fitzgerald -

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.   - Fulton J. Sheen -

He liked women with little butts and big tits? Someone had played with one too many barbie dolls as a kid.   - Kelley Armstrong -

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .   - Betty Smith -

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.   - Orhan Pamuk -

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.   - Gaston Bachelard -

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.   - Marguerite Yourcenar -

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.   - Harold Kushner -

Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.   - John Steinbeck -

I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?   - J.R. Moehringer -

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.   - Alberto Manguel -

If you love books enough, books will love you back.   - Jo Walton -

I pull my foot back again, but Four's hands clamp around my arms, and he pulls me away from her with irresistible force. I breathe through gritted teeth, staring at Molly's blood-covered face, the color deep and rich and beautiful, in a way. She groans, and I hear a gurgling in her throat, watch blood trickle from her lips. 'You won,' Four mutters. 'Stop.' I wipe the sweat from my forehead. He stares at me. His eyes too wide; they look alarmed. 'I think you should leave,' he says. 'Take a walk.' I'm fine,' I say. 'I'm fine now,' I say again, this time for myself.   - Veronica Roth -

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.   - Salman Rushdie -

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...   - Michel Houellebecq -

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.   - Virginia Woolf -

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.   - Arthur Schopenhauer -

Reading is reading - no matter what the material.   - Giovanna Fletcher -

Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.   - Cassandra Clare -

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.   - Jeanette Winterson -

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.   - Carlos Ruiz Zafón -

....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.   - Mortimer J. Adler -

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.   - John Updike -

Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.   - Britney Spears -

Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.   - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.   - Carl Sagan -

One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.   - Carl Sagan -

For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me... I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside.   - Elizabeth C. Bunce -

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.   - Sven Birkerts -

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.   - Jeanette Winterson -

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.   - Laurie Halse Anderson -

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'   - David Eddings -

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: 'It is simply a matter,' he explained to April, 'of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.   - Neil Gaiman -

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody   - George Bernard Shaw -

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.   - Holly Black -

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.   - Edward P. Morgan -

Quiet people have the loudest minds.   - Stephen King -

I write to find strength.   - Shannon L. Alder -

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.   - David Quammen -

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.   - James Russell Lowell -

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.   - Moses Hadas -

Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours.   - Mia James -

Too many books. Too few centuries.   - Jay Kristoff -

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.   - Nick Hornby -

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.   - Shannon Hale -

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.   - Shannon Hale -

Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly   - Jayne Ann Krentz -

الأمر الوحيد الذي أندم عليه هو أنه لن يتسنى لي قراءة كل الكتب التي أود قرائتها.   - فرانسواز ساجان -

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.   - C.S. Lewis -

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again.   - Jennifer E. Smith -

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.   - Cameron Dokey -

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?)   - Ray Bradbury -

How does it feel, anyway?'   - Markus Zusak -

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.   - Anthony Doerr -

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.   - J.R.R. Tolkien -

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.   - Walter Benjamin -

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.   - Aaron Swartz -

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.   - Colin Firth -

An active mind didn't need distractions in its physical environment. It needed a collection of outstanding books and a good lamp. Maybe some cheese and crackers.   - J.R. Ward -

Nudge threw her arms around my neck. 'I love you Max! I love all of us too!'   - James Patterson -

I think a good book is a good book forever.   - Megan Whalen Turner -

I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.   - Kate Morton -

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.   - Anton Chekhov -

Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.   - Patrick Rothfuss -

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.   - David Almond -

You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.   - John Waters -

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, 'Oh, the book is better.   - Paulo Coelho -

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.   - Kathleen Thompson Norris -

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.   - Voltaire -

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.   - Ray Bradbury -

One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.   - E. Lockhart -

If your library is not 'unsafe,' it probably isn't doing its job.   - John Berry -

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.   - Ezra Pound -

An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.   - Brandon Mull -

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.   - John Green -

No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.   - Bohumil Hrabal -

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.   - Arthur Schopenhauer -

Books fall open, you fall in   - David McCord -

He'll be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's yabber.   - George R.R. Martin -

The world’s greatest achievers have been those who have always stayed focussed on their goals and have been consistent in their efforts.   - Dr Roopleen -

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.   - Mark Twain -

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.   - Helene Hanff -

My bookcase is all yours.'   - Kasie West -

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.   - Laurie Notaro -

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.   - William Shakespeare -

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.   - Judith Butler -

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.   - Neil Gaiman -

A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.   - William Styron -

The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.   - Markus Zusak -

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.   - Dorothy Parker -

I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.   - Amy Plum -

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.   - Neil Gaiman -

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.   - Gabrielle Zevin -

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.   - Naomi Shihab Nye -

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.   - Ursula K. Le Guin -

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.   - Ursula K. Le Guin -

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.   - Martin Luther -

I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.   - George R.R. Martin -

I'm pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.   - Colleen Hoover -

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.   - Mae West -

I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.   - Ilona Andrews -

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.   - G.K. Chesterton -

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.   - Barbara Kingsolver -

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.   - Donalyn Miller -

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.   - Frances Hodgson Burnett -

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.   - Steven Wright -

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,' she had once said. 'Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.   - Alan Bradley -

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of ot

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.   - Samuel Butler -

A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.   - Kelley Armstrong -