Bibliophilia Quotes

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow. ~ Alan Jacobs

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

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN most interested in the question of what makes a house a home. What are the elements that move a house beyond its physical structure and provide the warmth that we all crave? In my fifteen years as a designer, I've come to understand that the answer is simple: It is about surrounding ourselves with things we love.

(...) And in this case, the beauty comes from the owners' love of books.

Books are beautiful objects in their own right - their bindings and covers - and the space they fill on shelves or stacked on coffee tables in colorful piles add balance and texture to any room. And just like any other part of a home, books require maintenance: They need to be dusted, categorized, rearranged, and maintained. Our relationship with them is dynamic and ever changing.

But our connection to them goes beyond the material. In each house we visited, the libraries were the heart of the home, meaningful to the collectors' lives. In this book, we tried to capture what they brought to the home - the life and spirit books added. Some subjects have working libraries they constantly reference; others fill their shelves with the potential pleasures of the unread. When we visited the homes, many people could find favorite books almost by osmosis, using systems known only to themselves.

(...) As we found repeatedly, surrounding yourself with books you love tells the story of your life, your interests, your passions, your values. Your ~ Nina Freudenberger

A good rule of thumb is: Pack twice as many books as changes of underwear. ~ Michael Dirda

This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28. ~ Ray Bradbury

We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land. ~ Umberto Eco

The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page
perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books. ~ Michael Dirda

Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at. ~ Geraldine Brooks

O my darling books…how dear to me are they all! For have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all! It seems as if, by long and sweet companionship, you had become part of myself. ~ Antoine Issac, Baron Silvestre De Sacy

Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a black market skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist's 'Twelve Terms' on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words. ~ Craig Padawer

Things turn up in strange places all the time. For example library books, which possess a disconcerting ability to move from place to place, seemingly of their own volition. ~ Lauren Willig

After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen - to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all. ~ Anna Lyndsey

But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile's soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all. ~ Michael Cox