and reading

words about books

"We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories."

• The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

"Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood."

• Jane Yolen

"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."

• Anne Lamott

"I opened a book and in I strode, now nobody can find me."

• Julia Donaldson

"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."

• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."

• Groucho Marx

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."

• Marcel Proust

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

• Haruki Murakami

"Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence."

• Lemony Snicket

"We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming."

• Anna Quindlen

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

• Maya Angelou

"But in the end we talked all night. Every story has a time to be told, I convinced her. Otherwise you'll forever be a prisoner to the secret inside you."

• Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."

• Inkspell by Cornelia Funke

"Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them."

• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

• The History Boys: The Film by Alan Bennett

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

• James Baldwin

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."

• William Styron

"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."

• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

"Those aren't books. You can't hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn't do that for you. I'm sorry."

• Bradbury when asked what he thinks of Amazon's Kindle

"Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us."

• Why secondhand bookstores smell good, Perfumes: The Guide

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

• Jorge Luis Borges

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."

• Chinese proverb

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."

• Christopher Morley

"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking."

• Jerry Seinfeld

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

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen *

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

• Vladimir Nabokov

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

• G.K. Chesterton

"A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

• Alan Bennett

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

• Cicero

"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 bit of a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism."

• Colin Firth *

"Here's to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."

• Charlaine Harris

"Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it."

• Markus Zusak

"Reading is dreaming with open eyes."