HMT Quotes

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.   - G.K. Chesterton -

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.   - John Wesley -

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.   - Sylvia Brownrigg -

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.   - Douglas Adams -

I hate to lend a book I love…it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me…   - L.M. Montgomery -

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?   - Marina Tsvetaeva -

This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.   - Maxine Hong Kingston -

You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.   - Maggie Stiefvater -

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.   - Mark Helprin -

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.   - Ursula K. Le Guin -

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!   - Jane Austen -

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.   - Jean-Jacques Rousseau -

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.   - Jorge Luis Borges -

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.   - Douglas Coupland -

Why does everyone think a girl who prefers books to people must be in want of a life?   - Lauren Morrill -

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them   - Laurie Halse Anderson -

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.   - Laini Taylor -

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it   - Karl Popper -

I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad, perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of their elusive affections.   - Cammie McGovern -

An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.   - Thomas Wharton -

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.   - Jeanette Winterson -

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.   - Amanda Cross -

There are essentially two things that will make you wise -- the books you read and the people you meet.   - Jack Canfield -

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.   - John Green -

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.   - Alberto Manguel -

...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.   - Robert Galbraith -

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.   - Abraham Lincoln -

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.   - Alain de Botton -

I have never been able to resist a book about books.   - Anne Fadiman -

It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.   - A.C. Grayling -

To read is to empower,   - Jane Evershed -

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.   - Michael Crichton -

A book is as private and consensual as sex.   - Chuck Palahniuk -

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.   - Arthur Schopenhauer -

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.   - Italo Calvino -

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.   - Ralph Waldo Emerson -

I only want power so I can get books.   - Eliezer Yudkowsky -

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.   - Andrei Tarkovsky -

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.   - Paul Auster -

I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.   - Donald Miller -

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.   - Ludwig Feuerbach -

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.   - Jo Walton -

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.   - Yoshida Kenko -

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.   - Jennifer Donnelly -

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.   - Laini Taylor -

I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.   - Lloyd Jones -

أتعلم لو كنت بقربي الآن ؟   - نجلاء حسن -

  - Neil Gaiman -

The library is like a candy store where everything is free.   - Jamie Ford -

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.   - Ralph Waldo Emerson -

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 -