My favorite quotes about books and reading

“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

“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” – Alan Bennett

“When I get a little money, I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes.” — Erasmus

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”  – C.S. Lewis

“I was born with a reading list I will never finish.” – Maud Casey

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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

“I cannot live without books.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” – Louisa May Alcott

“Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.” – George R.R. Martin

“I am simply a ‘book drunkard.’ Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” — L.M. Montgomery

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Marcus T. Cicero

“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.” – Arnold Lobel

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.” – Jules Renard

“Reading makes me feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives in addition to my own.” – Arlaina Tibensky

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Daniel Handler

“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” — Madeleine L’Engle

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.” — Neil Gaiman

“The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.” – Jonathan Franzen

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.” — Marcel Proust

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.” — Vladimir Nabokov

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” –Henry Ward Beecher

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” –Joseph Brodsky

“There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read only once can’t.” – Gail Carson Levine

“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!” – John Waters

“If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you.” – Terry Pratchett

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx

“My home is where my books are.” – Ellen Thompson