J B Books Quotes

“The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless.”

— MacDonald Harris

“It's all so beautiful ... the spring ... and books and music and fires ... Why aren't they enough?”

— Kathleen Norris

“I think a free library is an outrageous perk. I think being able to take out 50 books at a time is an astounding luxury, especially if you've priced hardbound books anytime since the Clinton administration. Go into a public library, fill out the application, and here you go, we'll loan you $1,000 worth of materials. Collateral? Nah - just take them. You're good for it. We'd do it for anybody.
And we would.”

— Don Borchert

“I have tread all three of his books and they held me spellbound interesting story. Its fiction based on fact ... mmm I like!”

— Harold Alvin

“Why is someone only passionate about books if they're into literary books that win prizes? Why can't you be passionate about books and only read romance?”

— Harriet Evans

“He eyed in the far corner of the room the carton of books they'd schlepped across the pond(ocean) They were both fearful of being stuck without a decent book, and who knew they would find everything from Virgil to Synge on the shelves of a fishing lodge?”

— Jan Karon

“I did become homesick, and whenever that happened, I'd hide away in the school library, where the books filled rows and rows of shelves. I'd find a chair and study my lesson books in geography, social studies, biology, and math. I'd lose myself in American and African history, and within the colorful maps of the world. No matter how foreign and lonely the world was outside, the books always reminded me of home, sitting under the mango tree.”

— William Kamkwamba

“( ... ) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.”

— Terry Pratchett

“I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.”

— John Jeremiah Sullivan

“I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina-Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.")”

— John Irving

“There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.”

— Michel De Montaigne

“We become attached to certain characters in novels, mostly because they have some mystery attaching to them. We re-read the books, but we're still left wanting to know more. In my own case, it was 'Great Expectations' and Miss Havisham in particular. Luckily, writers have the option of making up the knowledge that reading doesn't supply.”

— Ronald Frame

“When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.”

— Lynn Abbey

“I was into comic books as a kid.”

— Len Wiseman

“I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.”

— Sandra Brown

“I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.”

— Isaac Hempstead-Wright

“I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: 'Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.'”

— Jose Rizal

“The things that are really important to me are my man, my animals and my books. I don't need anything else.”

— Mary Crosby

“Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.”

— Matthew Stewart

“I'm one of those who can't read the books after they've seen the movie.”

— Peter Dinklage

“Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn't want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.”

— Peter York

“All these things Alanna knew from her father's books and maps, but the reality took her breath away as a paragraph written in a book never could.”

— Tamora Pierce

“I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.”

— K.A. Applegate

“I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.”

— Deborah Moggach

“I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'”

— Sophie Hannah

“I love my books.”

— Elizabeth Edwards

“There are truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart.”

— Susan Juby

“No," Tessa said. "You are a person just like me." His eyes searched her face, mystified; she held his hand tighter, lacing her fingers with his. "Don't you see, Will? You're a person like me. You are like me. You say the things I think but never say out loud. You read the books I read. You love the poetry I love. You make me laugh with your ridiculous songs and the way you see the truth of everything. I feel like you can look inside me and see all the places I am odd or unusual and fit your heart around them, for you are odd and unusual in just the same way." With the hand that was not holding his, she touched his cheek, lightly. "We are the same.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read.”

— Paulo Coelho

“Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. This”

— Eduardo Galeano

“Books are the true means of acquiring talent. If one does not read one remains ignorant, and ignorance can never produce true painters.”

— Francesco Albani

“If only it were God's will that printed and written materials have as much influence on the people as the princes and their censors fear! Considering the countless good books we have, the world would have changed for the better a long time ago.”

— Franz Grillparzer

“Religion, according to Alfred North Whitehead, is a phenomenon that begins in wonder and ends in wonder. Feelings of awe, reverence, and gratitude are primary, and these can never be learned from books. We gain them from sitting high on a cliff side, gazing at the sea, lost in reverie and listening to the laughter of children.”

— Gary A. Kowalski

“I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldn't be so hard, right?”

— Heidi Julavits

“It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.”

— Hosea Ballou

“So I took an interest in politics, but I don't know whether I enjoyed it! It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

“Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“If you see our best seller list, most of them are books that are given as gifts. They are books you give to flatter somebody.”

— John Gimlette

“The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.”

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil sub-stance.”

— John Milton

“There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever
the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.”

— Mahatma Gandhi