Bibliophile Quotes

She was a bibliophile - she would be perfectly happy never talking to another human being again as long as she had books to read. ~ Brenda L. Harper

A good book is a story that you cannot wait to finish, but you never, ever want it to end. ~ Sally (Corson) Rogers

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books? ~ Laini Taylor

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing. ~ David S.E. Zapanta

Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars ~ Holless Wilbur Allen

She wanted to own a book so badly and she had thought the copying would do it. But the pencilled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked. ~ Betty Smith

What's your favorite book?" he mocks, lifting his head back up. "Asking a bibliophile that question is pure evil. There's no way I can choose only one, and if you make me choose one, you're forcing me to betray the hundreds of other books that have knocked me on my ass and shaped my soul. If you ask me that, you're the devil. ~ Rachael Wade

Done to death by books? There were worse ways to go, even if you weren't a bibliophile. ~ Martin Edwards

It's more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family ~ Lisa Taddeo

A book collector is mad enough to begin with, Watson; but tempt him with some such bait as this Shakespeare quarto and he is bereft of all sanity. ~ Vincent Starrett

The goal of this book is to triple the size of your To Be Read pile. It's a literary Wunderkammer, connecting you with books you might love for all kinds of reasons―because the subject speaks to you, because you found it through a great local library, or because there is a cute cat on the cover. Like a portable, beloved bookstore with aisles full of passionate shelftalkers, this volume contains for everyone who enters. Each time you open it, you'll find another jewel you didn't you needed to find until that moment. ~ Jane Mount

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her. ~ Pat Conroy

George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine. ~ Anne Fadiman

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 hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day - terrified of letting him slip and tumble - I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following:

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti) - 'Inclusiveness' - may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my tha ~ Christopher Hitchens

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends - books - it's because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: "What did they think of us?" - "Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?" - "Did they like us?" - nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading. ~ Marcel Proust

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

Ryodan says softly, "Holy strawberries, Dani, we're in a jam."
I look at him like he's sprouted two heads. Holy strawberries? In a jam? Even Barrons looks stumped.
He continues, "But don't worry. Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods - you really butchered that one, by the way - I've got it in the bag. How about this one: holy borrowing bibliophile, let's book. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

This place might have been paradise, a treasure trove far greater than any to be found in a pirate yarn.
Everywhere he looked there were books.
They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather, and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold. ~ Lavie Tidhar

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense. ~ Norman MacCaig

He pinched the remaining chapters' pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book. ~ David S.E. Zapanta

There was nothing as romantic as the feel of a book in your hands. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun. ~ Kevin Smokler

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices. ~ William Lyon Phelps

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

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

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She's a complete bibliophile, so I've pretty much grown up around libraries and books. ~ Paula Gruben

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, "So this is the library." There certainly couldn't be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading.

In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks - James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers - struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan's History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy. ~ Lauren Willig

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was
she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library
a lot like being in love for the first time. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves. ~ Will Thomas

As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown. ~ Laura Whitcomb

...maybe you can curb your bibliophile tendencies for the moment? It's not like we don't have other...priorities....at present."
"Nonsense," the bookseller said. "There's always time to appreciate a good book. ~ Greg Cox

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this. ~ Charles Bukowski

Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete. ~ Barbara Wersba

Well, I've always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I'll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on my chest and a seraphic smile of peace and contentment smoothing out all the ugliness of my visage... ~ E. Norman Torry

I don't like playing playstation. It seems like a waste of time to me. Reading, instead, leaves something inside you. ~ Mattia Caldara

Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile."
"A what?" asked Eragon.
"One who loves books," explained Jeod. ~ Christopher Paolini

Reading makes our soul richer. ~ Salil Jha

It is odd, isn't it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It's a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer's block, so I've done it ever since. Librarians must hate me. ~ Mohsin Hamid

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape. ~ Frazier Glenn Miller

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Mom, I feel good. This dress makes me feel like someone I didn't know I could be. I've never owned anything like it. But if when you see this - when you see me- you think it's a pity, that it's a shame I didn't lose a few, then screw you, Mom. Try harder. ~ Julie Murphy

Page after page she read
She cried and laughed
She swore and cheered
She fell in love with simple characters
She loathed imaginary enemies
She read and read saying one more chapter
She fell asleep with the books in her grasp
She got lost in the words and escaped the world ~ N.S.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -– low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books. ~ Robin Sloan

Of course, she had paid for her books –most of them. Like almost every other bibliophile on the planet, Tess had books, borrowed from friends, that she had never returned, even as some of her favorite titles lingered in friends' homes, never to be seen again. ~ Laura Lippman

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. ~ Voltaire

A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven. ~ E. Norman Torry

Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the same person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness instead of pain. ~ Haidji

You don't 'waste time' by reading, you add value to it. You clock in. If you really had time to kill, you'd be napping during the eclipse. ~ Nick Younker

I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent. ~ Sherman Alexie