Sharing Books Quotes

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing. ~ Sara Sheridan

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words. ~ Donalyn Miller

The characteristics of healthy boundaries include self-respect; non-tolerance of abuse or disrespect; responsibility for exploring and nurturing personal potential; two-way communication of wants, needs, and feelings; expectations of reciprocity; and sharing responsibility and power. ~ Laurie Buchanan

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you. ~ E.B. White

Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I've always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn't know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those "many thousand" selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It's you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I've been waiting to tell everything to. ~ Suzanne Berne

Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing. ~ Isabel Allende

Does anyone really think that America today is lacking preachers, books, Bible translations, and neat doctrinal statements? What we really lack is the passion to call upon the Lord until he opens the heavens and shows himself powerful. ~ Jim Cymbala

Looking back, I see that I write books about brothers and sisters, about what makes up a family, what works and what is nurturing. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men. ~ Beatrice Wood

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Books are the most tolerant of friends. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Reading is a beautiful paradise. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

He wants to accomplish something in life, learn languages, see the world, read a thousand books, he wants to discover whether there is any core, but sometimes it's hard to think and read when one is stiff and sore after a difficult fishing voyage, wet and cold after twelve hours' working in the meadows, when his thoughts can be so heavy that he can hardly lift them, then it's a long way to the core. ~ Jon Kalman Stefansson

Uh, Miss Carlson," I said, standing at her desk after everybody else had gone on to their next class, "somebody told me you went to that guy's funeral the one the highway patrol shot."
"Yes," SHe said. "I did."
She didn't look like she was mad at me about it. She had real long eyelashes. I bet she was good-looking when she was young.
"Was he a relative or something?" That was what I was afraid of.
"No. Not even a friend really." She paused, like she was hunting for the right words. Finally she said, "I read a book once that ended with the words 'the incommunicable past' You can only share the past with someone who's shared it with you. So I can't explain to you what Mark was to me, exactly. I knew him a long time ago. ~ S.E. Hinton

Not comprehending things the way other people do is fine in academia because we can usually find our own methods, but in social situations, this same tendency plays out differently - we can't always impose our own rules and priorities on others. We can't research people in everyday conversation the way we research information from books. It is not uncommon for us, when we're young, to ask too many questions of others, which makes them uncomfortable. If we could set the tone, we would probably be more comfortable, but we can't so we shut down. ~ Rudy Simone

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this. ~ Zadie Smith

To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You. ~ Michael J. Sandel

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can. ~ Jane Hamilton

The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books. ~ George Orwell

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 ~ Anatole Broyard

Books don't change the world, people change the world, books only change people. ~ Mario Quintana

There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special "women's fiction" designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like. ~ Roxane Gay

An active engagement with written material through reflective thought gained by reading and writing leads to intellectual growth. A person whom fails to read and write will experience mental stagnation. Failure to cultivate ideas by exposing oneself to written material limits a person's resources to what they see and hear. Passively reviewing external stimuli might lull a person into believing that they are actively thinking and growing. The more external stimuli a person exposes themselves to, the less time that is available for pursing mental, emotional, and spiritual growth. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We have learned to eat like snakes. When there is something to eat - we eat enough to last for a week. When there is nothing - we don't eat. Now, when we get our food supply, we eat it all, right there, we leave nothing for tomorrow. Like the birds. And then we read our books. We go after spiritual food... ~ Jonas Mekas

The theme that runs through all my books is connection. Connection - physical and non-physical - with other humans, and connection with nature are necessary for our well-being. Without it, we are depressed, lonely, and fail to thrive. ~ Mary Alice Monroe

I don't know if Marcus knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that's exactly what he was doing. He was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land. ~ Cecelia Ahern

For weeks Octavio returned to the shelter of the trees. The woman would appear as the sun reached midday. She would walk to the edge of the trees, find her chair and drag it to the boat pond. Every Sunday the same chair, the same spot. Every Sunday a book.
He needed only one word to imagine a hundred stories: she -
was a dancer; cooling her feet after a morning of twists and leaps.
was the daughter of a sea captain, remembering her childhood as the toy boats crossed the pond.
was an empress hiding among her subjects, shielding her face with a scarf made from the silk of ten thousand worms. Five thousand green, five thousand blue.
was a teacher, a lover of learning, patient and gentle with her students.
She - was a reader.
He had a library. ~ C.S. Richardson

though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. it is for this reason that a a bookshop -- especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian - is an arsenal of explosives, an armory of revolutions, an opium den of reaction.

and just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have alwasys been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority. in a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altar where all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! here, like depserate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. a bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

of all the 'houses of ill fame' which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with this minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.

~ autobiography ~ John Cowper Powys

Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. ~ Billy Joel

I go around with my books so much and I love to perform on stage, to remind everybody that the lights are off, the phones are off, and for this hour, it's going to be like your mother reading to you. We're going to remember why we love stories. I think that gets lost in over-intellectualizing. ~ T.C. Boyle

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. ~ Julio Cortazar

In my head, the 5 issues of A Spoon Too Short comprise one novel: a 100 page graphic novel sequel to Douglas' two Dirk books, taking some of the ideas he was working on before he died, and a whole bunch of new stuff from me and a little from Max Landis (who is the Executive Producer on the book as well as writing the forthcoming TV series). ~ Arvind Ethan David

In my books, there is always a prince, and he always happens upon the damsel in the most unexpected places. ~ MarcyKate Connolly

His blue eyes, lively and close-set, revealed the gentleness of a man who had read all of the books. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Books were my friends," said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wineglass. "I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole nonreading life. ~ Nina George

I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I'm getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go. ~ Warren Ellis

Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team, my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff, we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing, public relations, accounting and all that sort of stuff. ~ Emeril Lagasse

Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 program - which temporarily moved billions of dollars of liability off the bank's books at the end of each quarter and replaced them a few days later at the start of the next quarter - was intentionally designed to hide the firm's financial weaknesses. This was a carefully crafted fraud, detailed by a court-appointed Lehman examiner. But no former Lehman executive ever faced criminal prosecution for it. Contrast this with the fact that a teenager who sells an ounce of marijuana can be put away for years. ~ Robert B. Reich

Laughter is healing and helpful and fun, and I see my role as an entertainer, and I want readers to leave my books smiling. ~ Gail Carriger

Because there is a belief that once you begin to open books, you will become a better person. It is Pandora's box, but in a good way. You are inching toward the promised land, page by page. ~ Don Borchert

One day there will be no books ... Yeah right. ~ Maria The Lone Wolf

Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say. ~ Malorie Blackman

Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen. ~ Robert Rodriguez

You can find magic
wherever you look.
Sit back and relax,
all you need is a book. ~ Dr. Seuss

You, my dear, should spend more time in a library. It's not just a hiding place, but also the place where the chases happen. ~ Jason Reynolds