Bibliophiles Quotes

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.”
― Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”
― Simon Van Booy

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”
― Anne Fadiman

“You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“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

“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

“We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.”
― Kevin Smokler, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays from Today's (and Tomorrow's) Young Authors on the State of the Art -- ... Hustle -- in the Age of Information Overload

“Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.”
― Carol Shields, Unless

“It's the loneliest people who love books the most...it was the opposite of loneliness, too, like there were too many people around me, forced connections, that I needed a little isolation to think on my own, to be my own person.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.”
― Mikita Brottman

“Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. . . my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it's a historical document.

My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given. . . But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I'm lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don't need many details - just the titles and dates would be fine - but oh, how I'd love to see them.

Those records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

“I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

“الباب الذي يُقفل في وجهِك عمداً، إيّاك أن تطرقهُ ثانيةً.

نجيب محفوظ-”
― نجيب محفوظ

“Music and books, they transport you. They make you feel in ways you didn’t know you could.”
― Alechia Dow, The Sound of Stars

“For a certain kind of person there is literally nothing nicer than eating breakfast by yourself on a moving train with a good book.”
― Lev Grossman, The Silver Arrow

“بإمكانكَ أن تقرأ وأنتَ ترعى أغنامك، لا علاقة للثقافة بالقهوة.”
― oussamamre

“...for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbors.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“If you read a book, you will unlock unknown doors of your soul. And who knows; you can find a treasure inside…”
― George Spyrou, Roxanne

“I have but one passion ; it swallows up every other ; it dwells with my darling books, and is fed by the treasures of beauty and wisdom which they contain.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Lodore

“And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle. Bookish people.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Books are time travel and space travel and mood-altering drugs. They are mind-melds and telepathy and past-life regression. How people can stand here and not sense the magic in them - it's inconceivable to her.”
― Toni Jordan, The Fragments

“Libraries were her favorite places, and when she traveled, she would start out at the local library, thus immediately identifying herself as a total nerd. They say you always remember your first time, and Nina definitely did. Walking into the Los Angeles Central Library to get her first library card, when she was eight or so, was still a memory she treasured. The entry hall of the library was as beautiful as any cathedral, and Nina had looked around and realized she would never run out of things to read, and that certainty filled her with peace and satisfaction. It didn't matter what hit the fan; as long as there were unread books in the world, she would be fine. Being surrounded by books the the closest she'd ever gotten to feeling like the member of a gang. The books had her back, and the nonfiction, at least, was ready to fight if necessary.”
― Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

“In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.”
― Ceridwen Dovey

“We ought to recollect ... that a book consists, like man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul.”
― William Ewart Gladstone, On Books and the Housing of Them

“...I wandered upstairs. There I strolled, lost in love, down the corridors and through the stacks, touching books, pulling volumes out, turning pages, thrusting volumes back, drowning in all the good stuffs that are the essence of libraries.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“What about Fahrenheit 451 in this day and age? Have I changed my mind about much that it said to me, when I was a younger writer? Only if by change you mean has my love of libraries widened and deepened, to which the answer is a yes that ricochets off the stacks and dusts talcum off the librarian’s cheek.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Oh, look at me, Montag. The man who loved books, no, the boy who was wild for them, insane for them, who climbed the stacks like a chimpanzee gone mad for them.

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.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451