Abigail > Abigail's Quotes

“What a pity every child couldn't learn to read under a willow tree...”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

“To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.”
― Will Thomas, Some Danger Involved

“When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.”
― Piers Anthony, Golem in the Gears

“What a blessing it is to love books.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”
― Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

“I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning.”
― Beth Pattillo, Jane Austen Ruined My Life

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?'
'It was books, admitted Miss Minton.
And Maia said, 'Good.”
― Eva Ibbotson, Journey to the River Sea

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
― Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

“In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.”
― Rachel Hall

“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”
― Eudora Welty

“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.”
― Arnold Bennett

“Don't give up on the power of books to change lives and the world. As everything goes digital, book formats will morph, but their profound influence will endure.”
― David Marshall

“Marco could not have known about the mystical effect of a full moon on cats and books left on their own in the library. Not until he saw the lines breathe, the words unveiled.”
― Rahma Krambo, Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria

“Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.”
― E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady

“A well-read person is a dangerous creature.”
― Hazim Bangwar

“While some dismiss the Bible as a dusty old book, I view its pages as portals to adventure. Not only is the book chock-full of clever plots and compelling stories, but it’s laced with historical insights and literary beauty. When I open the Scripture, I imagine myself exploring an ancient kingdom . . . With every encounter, I learn something new about their life journeys and am reminded that the Bible is more than a record of the human quest for God: it’s the revelation of God’s quest for us.” - Scouting the Divine”
― Margaret Feinberg

“Each book was like an underwater cave, and when I rose again to the surface, I was pale and grumpy, resentful of everyone who hadn't been where I'd been.”
― Mary Stewart Atwell, Wild Girls

“I've never understood the desire for books with matched bindings. You don't go through life looking for sets of matched people, and books are just as individual.”
― Susan Lendroth

“I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.”
― David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.”
― Richard L. Brandt, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

“The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible.”
― Patricia Duncker

“Wooed by a vivid cover, she picked one up and leafed through it. She loved thee way it smelled, the ink, the fine paper, the oversized photographs.”
― Elizabeth Brundage, Somebody Else's Daughter

“When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the thresh-hold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered in mud and mire,and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom,I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Letters of Machiavelli : A Selection

“Dogeared pages were Antichrist of book lovers everywhere.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx