Bookshelf Quotes

Brad got me this great thing for Christmas. It's a bookshelf that has a book on every religion. That's how we plan to raise our kids. Teach them about all religions. They can pick one or be a student of all of them. We'll celebrate Kwanzaa for our girl. We'll celebrate moon and water festivals for our boys. We'll take them to temples in certain countries. Also to church. ~ Angelina Jolie

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.

So many dudes I've dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)

They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I "get them" more than anyone they've ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.

None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can't cure.

They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.

Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.

They don't want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.

So they invite me over when they're going through writer's block but don't answer m ~ Lora Mathis

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. ~ Derek Walcott

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism wa ~ W.B. Yeats

I realized pretty quickly I couldn't marry a man without a bookshelf. ~ Jojo Moyes

I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading. ~ Barbara Pym

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. ~ Allison Hoover Bartlett

My books were my prized possessions. I had a bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud of it. I loved my books and kept them in pristine condition. I read them over and over, but I did not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured every single one. ~ Trevor Noah

She has a bookshelf for a heart, and ink runs through her veins, she'll write you into her story with the typewriter in her brain. Her bookshelf's getting crowded. With all the stories that's she's penned, of all the people who flicked through her pages but closed the book before it ended. And there's one pushed to the very back, that sits collecting dust, with its title in her finest writing, 'The One's Who Lost My Trust'. There's books shes scared to open, and books she doesn't close. Stories of every person she's met stretched out in endless rows. Some people have only one sentence while others once held a main part, thousands of inky footprints that they've left across her heart. You might wonder why she does this, why write of people she once knew? But she hopes one day she'll mean enough for someone to write about her too. ~ E.H.

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Because who wants an incredibly written book sitting on their bookshelf if they have to stare at a shitty cover? ~ Colleen Hoover

If you have a passion, feed it. Sometimes the passion will wane and you won't have time for it. Sometimes it will flourish and you won't have enough hours in the day to harvest it.

If it takes twenty years, so be it. Whatever happens though, if writing is something you love, don't give up. If 'it' happens you will be the happiest person on earth. If 'it' doesn't, it will still be a great legacy, if only on your own bookshelf at home. ~ Sarah Flint

Every time I get mad, I grab my hammer and make a bookshelf or something. ~ Anthony Mackie

Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route. ~ Theodore Bikel

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time. ~ Christopher Bollen

On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

Ask anyone with a big book collection, and they'll tell you moving them was the hardest part of the move. Take down a bookshelf and there's often no less than four, possibly up to eight, good Lord if it's over ten, boxes of dense material. This is the single greatest argument for welcoming ebooks. Abandoning print and having your Kindle on display instead doesn't sound like such a bad idea while carrying book box number seven to the car. ~ Lauren Leto

Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of he sister's outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumbled of her sister's old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try and fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters-Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia. ~ Holly Black

In design-speak, 'a library' means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that's all you have room for. ~ Nate Berkus

Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn't great but it also wasn't as bad as no words at all. It hadn't exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn't have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother's.
He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they'd been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.
When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn't surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch.
Wendy.
Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he'd never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he'd known far too well in the years since she'd died. He and Sara both.
He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she'd walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she'd been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushe ~ Amanda M. Lyons

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

We are improved by reading books not by owning them. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In some way, the magazine helped validate a new kind of American manhood--the kind of guy who would court you with mix tapes, sported Converse Chuck Taylors and shaggy bedhead on his lanky frame, wept over the disappearing rain forest, and had Backlash on his bookshelf. ~ Kara Jesella

Every stylish man should have a copy of 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand on his bookshelf. ~ Orlando Bloom

Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present - and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser - but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all. ~ Jack Iams

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Another bad cure is the sentence awkwardly stretched out by a "that" or "which" clause. For example, "Leaping from the couch he seized the revolver from the bookshelf that stood behind the armchair," or, "She turned, shrieking, throwing up her arms in terror at the sight of the gorilla that had arrive that morning from Africa, which had formerly been its home." What happens in such sentences, obviously, is that they tend to trail off, lose energy. ~ John Gardner

Life's best adventures are as close as your nearest bookshelf. Tour Europe with the Count of Monte Cristo. Dance a ball with Mr Darcy. Hunt down bad guys with Stephanie Plum. Amazing things can happen when you read. ~ Ally Carter

The cleanest book on a dusty bookshelf is usually a dirty one. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Pumpkin Bunny. Bridget's eyes drifted to the bookshelf where her favorite childhood toy sat propped up in the corner. It had been a gift from her dad from before she could remember, a soft, fluffy stuffed bunny popping out of a pumpkin like a stripper from a birthday cake. ~ Gretchen McNeil

You could eat sushi off my bookshelf. My cleaning regime is like a battleground. I'm Genghis Khan and my cleaning products are my Mongolian army and I take no prisoners. The rest of my life is an experiment in chaos so I like to keep my flat neat. ~ Ryan Adams

Yet the bookshelf is also conspicuous in its absence. When we enter a living room without books or bookshelves, we wonder if the people in the house do nothing but watch television. ~ Henry Petroski

I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know. ~ Jeff Zentner

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. 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 to the foot. ~ Alan Bennett

I'd give you some pants, but I don't wear any," a mage standing by a bookshelf remarked sympathetically. ~ Andrey Vasilyev

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself. ~ Chris Abani

I see the beatitudes of books displayed on a bookshelf. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. ~ Gary Shteyngart

He bounded over to a bookshelf in the far corner of the room, extracting a hardbound volume and gleefully handing it over. "And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie," I read off of the cover. ~ Alexa Donne

Maybe a bookshelf will topple over and that's how I go out -- painful, but there are worse ways to die. ~ Adam Silvera

I don't choose between my house phone and my mobile. I don't choose between my laptop and my notebook. And I don't intend to choose between my e-reader and my bookshelf. ~ Sara Sheridan

I should have known," I said. "Silence seemed smart, but now he's made this huge."

Mr. Rasmus grunted. "We need a plan."

"We have a plan," I snapped. "Is there anything we really could have done besides marrying me off faster?"

General Leger stood with his back against a bookshelf, still staring at the blank screen. "We could kill him."

I sighed. "I really don't want that to be my go-to move. ~ Kiera Cass

I fell so damn hard, Tenleigh. Standing right at this bookshelf. I gave you my heart and you weren't even in the room. ~ Mia Sheridan

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!). ~ Tony Reinke

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though. ~ Tim Pratt

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf. ~ Emily Henry

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth. ~ Arundhati Roy

You can read minds, and you didn't tell me?" Link stared at me like he just found out I was the Silver Surfer. He rubbed his head nervously. "Hey, man, all that stuff about Lena? I was yankin' your chain." He looked away. "Are you doin' it now? You're doin' it, aren't you? Dude, get out of my head." He backed away from me and into the bookshelf.
"I can't read your mind, you idiot. ~ Kami Garcia

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf
felt akin to an instance of religious grace. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable. ~ Andres Ruzo

I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it's started to thrive. ~ Margaret Stohl

The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended. ~ Holly Black

If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol. ~ Jonathan Evison

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others. ~ Phyllis Rose

Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth
and surprising reality
of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably. ~ Steven Saylor

Here's one of my bad habits: when I go to someone's house, I head straight to their bookshelf. ~ Mark Frauenfelder

Sumire was so bereft of household goods the place looked deserted. There weren't any curtains in the windows and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a gang of intellectual refugees. ~ Haruki Murakami

All books are hyggelig, but classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens have a special place on the bookshelf. At the right age, your kids may also love to cuddle up with you in the hyggekrog and have you read to them. Probably not Tolstoy. ~ Meik Wiking

There is more to life than a job. I didn't ever want to look back and point to a bookshelf of videotapes and say, 'That's been my life.' It's so much easier to write a resume than it is to craft a spirit. ~ Jane Clayson

Thwack. The nail drove deeper, as if Montgomery was driving it into my very heart. How hard was it to fix a loose nail? He hit it again and again, determined to set that bookshelf straight. Determined to do something right, after so much wrong. ~ Megan Shepherd

Mum's mobile was the most immoblie cell phone in the world. It often lived on the top of the bookshelf closest to the front door. It was there so she'd see it before she left the house. The trouble was, Mum was alwayd leaving the house in a mad rush and the mobile stayed put. ~ Catherine Bateson

The bookshelf in my heart holds many titles. So can yours. ~ Sylvia McNicoll

I totally geeked when I discovered (while in college) that Tolkien had a published version of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', so that's my favorite version. I think I have 3 or 4 copies on my bookshelf ~ Virginia Chandler

Jose unfroze and began looking around the room, picking up knickknacks and checking titles on the bookshelf. The parrot cracked pistachios and watched him.
"Dickhead," the parrot said.
I gave the bird some more nuts. I believe in positive reinforcement. ~ Rick Riordan

I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me. ~ Robert W. Service

Secret Door"

Fools on parade cavort and carry on
For waiting eyes
That you would rather be beside than in front of
But she's never been the kind to be hollowed by the stares

She swam out of tonight's phantasm
Grabbed my hand and made it very clear
There's absolutely nothing for us here
It's a magnolia celebration
To be attempted on a Wednesday night
It's better than to get a reputation
As a miserable little tyke
At least that's the conclusion
She came to in this overture

The secret door swings behind us
She's saying nothing
She's just giggling along

Her arms were folded most indignant
Not looking like she was soon to leave
I had to squint in order to believe
And then like a butler pushing on a bookshelf
I'm unveiling the unexpected
I, who was earlier reluctant, was suddenly embarrassed and corrected
How could such a creature
Survive in such a habitat

The secret door swings behind us
She's saying nothing
She's just giggling along
And even if they were to find us
I wouldn't notice, I'm completely occupied

At all the fools on parade
Cavort and carry on for waiting eyes
That you would rather be beside than in front of
But she's never been the kind
To be hollowed by the stares
Fools on parade
Frolic and fuck about to make her gaze
Turn to a scribble on a page by a ~ Arctic Monkey's

Are you still with this man?
On no, She sniffed. I realized pretty quickly I couldn't marry a man without a bookshelf.
No bookshelf?
In his house. Not even a little one in his loo for the Reader's Digest.
Many people in this country don't read books.
He didn't have one book. Not even a true crime. Or a Jeffrey Archer. I mean, what does that tell you about someone's character? ~ Jojo Moyes

Dear Millionaires, if you don't have a bookshelf that spins into another room, give me your money because you're spending it wrong. ~ Pinterest.com

His eyes gravitated towards the wall-to-wall bookshelf at one end of the room. 'You folks like books, I see. ~ Regina Doman

My books are my brain and my heart made visible. ~ Merilyn Simonds

I had to put this slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined. ~ Henry Petroski

I looked at the titles on the bookshelf and found a book on Greek mythology next to a book of poetry, which was flanked by a book on German philosophy. "How are these organized?"
"They're not."
I turned to him. "How do you find anything? There must be thousands of books here."
"I like the search. It's like visiting old friends. ~ Julianne Donaldson

Zane walked over to the bookshelf and picked up a tin container with pencils in it. He rattled the pencils around in a circle, then reached into the tin to pull out a piece of chalk. Then he drew a circle on the wood floor around the chair Mary sat in.
"What are you doing?"
"At the end of my dream, I was very old. And I shed my skin. And I became something frightening that wasn't like me at all. If I come back, and I've turned into a monster, then you'll be safe from me in there."
"Oh, I don't like this." She felt a little punchy, a little giggly. "And then you're going off to the bathroom to pee? You're going to have to hold it." She held onto his hand. It was like her dad's hand, maybe even a bit older. The skin was soft, and thinner than her father's.
"No, really, I have to go." He pulled his hand.
She didn't let go. She giggled. "I'm not going to let you go. Not after you just said that to me."
Her giggling was a bit infectious. And he got the bug. He laughed. "But I have to go."
"Well, you shouldn't have said that first. 'I might turn into a horrible monster of which you should be so afraid that you'll remain in a chalk . . .'" She giggle-snorted. "'Chalk ring.' How's that going to help me?" She giggled again. "I'm having too much fun, Zane; I'm not going to let this turn into some horrible nightmare, because then I'm going to make myself wake up and I might never see you again."
They stared and stared at each other, the grins fro ~ James T. Riley

My father always says, to know a man, you must visit his library, for the contours of his mind have been shaped by the words on his bookshelf ~ Rehan Khan

When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it ... Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ~ Nora Ephron

We find paradise in every library and bookshop. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books. ~ Matthew Tobin Anderson

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again. ~ Michael Dirda

Who said I was going to give it to you?" He smiled and took a step toward me. "Maybe I have secret love for Fitzwilliam Darcy. We do share a name. I also need to get a gift for someone who would love it."
"If I can't have it, no one can." I narrowed my eyes in mock threat.
"Is that so?"
"You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers." I backed into the bookshelf behind me.
"Maybe I just need to distract you long enough to steal it." He put a hand on the shelf by my head.
"And how do you plan on doing that?" I licked my lips.
"I have a few ideas." He moved his other hand, caging me in, and leaned down. ~ Nichole Chase

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work. ~ Rashid Johnson

My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf. ~ Michael Easton

Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn't that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be? ~ Marie Kondo

Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. ~ Roald Dahl

I felt the stupidity rising in my throat and bit down harder, staring at his collarbone and the small piece of blue sea glass he wore on a leather cord around his neck, rising and falling.
Rising.
Falling.
Seconds? Hours? I didn't know. He'd made the necklace the year before from a triangular piece of glass he'd found during their family vacation to Zanzibar Bay, right behind the California beach house they rented for three weeks every summer. According to Matt, red glass was the rarest, followed by purple, then dark blue. To date he'd found only one red piece, which he'd made into a bracelet for Frankie a few months earlier. She never took it off.
I loved all the colors – dark greens, baby blues, aquas, and whites. Frankie and Matt brought them back for me in mason jars every summer. They lived silently on my bookshelf, like frozen pieces of the ocean I had never seen.
"Come here," he whispered, his hand still stuck in my wild curls, blond hair winding around his fingers.
"I still can't believe you made that," I said, not for the first time. "It's so – cool."
Matt looked down at the glass, his hair falling in front of his eyes.
"Maybe I'll give it to you," he said. "If you're lucky. ~ Sarah Ockler

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books. ~ Roald Dahl

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. ~ Jamie Zawinski

When Maddie prepared for bed behind her screen that night, she emerged to find the most terrible sight yet.

"Oh, really, Logan. That just isn't fair."
He looked up from his reclines pose in her bedroom chaise longue, his face partly covered behind a book bound in dark green leather. "What?"

"You're reading Pride and Prejudice?"

He shrugged. "I found it on your bookshelf."
Seeing him read any book was bad enough. But her favorite book? This was sheer torture.

"Just promise me something, please," she said.

"What's that?"

"Just promise me that I'm not going to come out from around this screen one night and find you holding a baby." That seemed the only possibility more devastating to her self-control.

"He chucked. "It doesna seem likely."

"Good. ~ Tessa Dare

Each and every one of us has moments like these, times when a book becomes more than a book. It is a touchstone and the stories between the pages are reflections of us. They remind us of who we were, who we are now and how we got there. The next time you have a bout of nostalgia, I encourage you not to pull out the old photo album. Head to your bookshelf instead, and see what surfaces. I guarantee it will be more than you think.

The pen is mightier than a lot of things. The sword was just the first one down. ~ Emily Asher-Perrin

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page. ~ Roman Payne

Do you read books?" Dr. Weiss asked her in one of her session with him.

She nodded in acceptance. Her lips were stitched with the thread of agony and isolation. She spoke less and when she was asked for anything. She used to nod.

"They are escape, aren't they? When I was a kid, I used to believe that the cover of the book is a door. You open it and go inside. I still believe that and the kid in me is still alive." Dr. Weiss walked to the bookshelf and pulled out a book.

Her eyelashes were heavier. The lower part was much more lighter than upper one. It had the comfort to leak down all its pain to the cheeks. The pain that could be evaporated.

"You are reading this book," He put a book on the glass table. It came in range of her eyesight. The book was titled "Depression."

He continued, "Or, perhaps, you and I, we both are in a book and someone is reading it on its couch, bed, in mobile or in train. Maybe after 15 pages the reader who has glued his eyes to this book may find that you are out of your depression completely. Look at the reader out of the page, look how curious he is. I would keep my mouth shut now, else it would get to know the whole story. ~ Himanshu Chhabra

The dragon flew up and settled in the crook of Mina's hood, and quickly became invisible again.
"I don't trust that thing," Jared shot back.
"Relax, I find him quite cute. Isn't that right, Ander?" She held up a finger and felt the invisible dragon rub its face against her.
"Great, you've named it, now you're gonna want to keep it. But I'm telling you that thing better be house-trained." He turned to the bookshelf and began to pull open the book to open the hidden exit door.
Mina felt Ander leave her shoulder but didn't let Jared know he was missing. She saw Constance's teacup float mysteriously above Jared's head. She clapped her hand over her mouth to contain the laughter. A second later the cup turned over, spilling lukewarm tea on Jared's unsuspecting head.
"Oh, it better not have just peed on me!" he screamed. ~ Chanda Hahn

The Only Thing,
I Like In Any House,
Is a Book shelf. ~ Aqeel Rafique

I was only testing that you were awake and in your right mind. The sight of you taking a nap against the bookshelf doesn't inspire confidence. ~ Kristin Cashore

If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain. ~ Alexander Theroux

I source images and ideas from different parts of my experiences, and sometimes they are things that are made-up, or just appear out of nowhere, like out of a dream or an image that I've seen in a book, or even the title of a book that I'm staring at on a shelf. It's a good way to write songs, just stare at a bookshelf! ~ Julia Stone

The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become ~ Sheridan Hay

I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I am so obsessed with my life that the books I used to read are resting in the bookshelf for years and my soul is dying in the arms of my life. ~ Neymat Khan