A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.
Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.
Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.
He wanted to tell her she'd have more room if she'd just get rid of her books, but he supposed that in her case, it would be like telling a mother she'd have more room if she threw out her children.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.
It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..
I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.
The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it.
I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.
