Melissa's favorite quotes

"Good books are as friends, willing to give to us if we are willing to make a little effort."
— Gordon B. Hinckley

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, friends, friendship, life

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
— Paul Sweeney

973 people liked it

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, classic, humor

5,486 people liked it

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: books, inspirational, reading, tea

1,671 people liked it

"May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books."
— Thomas Carlyle

2 people liked it

"A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you."
— Daniel J. Boorstein

5 people liked it

"Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They’re never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal."
— Lenore Hershey

tags: giving

9 people liked it

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
— Oscar Wilde

22 people liked it

"When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book."
— Christopher Morley

20 people liked it

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. "
— Francis Bacon

tags: books, reading

112 people liked it

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

tags: books, soul

11,023 people liked it

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: books

20 people liked it

"Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.

Books are humanity in print."
— Barbara W. Tuchman

tags: books, civilization, humanity

44 people liked it

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

tags: books, soul

100 people liked it

"Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: guineas, three

12 people liked it

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

tags: books

1,337 people liked it

"After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as the do for the writer - perhaps more."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

36 people liked it

"The summer movies are coming out. My advice: just stay home and burn a good book."
— Stephen Colbert

tags: humor

21 people liked it

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
— Robertson Davies

tags: architecture, books, reading

113 people liked it

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

tags: animals, books, dogs, friends, humor

6,585 people liked it

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." "
— Helen Exley

12 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading

2,633 people liked it

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

tags: books, companionship, friends, friendship, god, reading, religion

30 people liked it

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
— Horace Mann

tags: books, house, windows

542 people liked it

"He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot."
— Arabic proverb

tags: books, borrowing, lending

127 people liked it

"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."
— Henry Miller

13 people liked it

"I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me."
— Helene Hanff (84, Charing Cross Road)

16 people liked it

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
— Hazel Rochman

4 people liked it

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."
— Walt Disney Company

tags: books

491 people liked it

"Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."
— Harry S. Truman

7 people liked it

"Books are not made for furniture,
but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."
— Henry Ward Beecher

tags: reading

65 people liked it

"I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense."
— Harold S. Kushner

tags: books, life

22 people liked it

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."
— Augustine of Hippo

160 people liked it

"This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

tags: books, friends

109 people liked it

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. "
— Kathleen Thompson Norris (Hands Full of Living)

tags: books

66 people liked it

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

tags: books

839 people liked it

"A well composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."
— Caroline Gordon

2 people liked it

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes"
— John le Carré

2 people liked it

"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens

tags: books, writing

336 people liked it

"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking."
— Jerry Seinfeld (SeinLanguage)

71 people liked it

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King

tags: writing

328 people liked it

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
— C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night: And Other Essays)

tags: age, fairy-tales

203 people liked it

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

tags: books, library, reading

1,430 people liked it

"I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life."
— Scott Corbett

22 people liked it

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

tags: books, reading

390 people liked it

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, humor, wit, writing

16 people liked it

"A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. "
— ~William Styron

3 people liked it

"I m not about to tell him that I am just like Anna and Emma, an adulteress. My books are my secret lovers, the friends I run to to get away from the daily drudgeries of life, to try out something new, and yes, to get away, for a few hours, from him. He doesn't need to know that my books are the affairs I don't have. "
— Sara Nelson (So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading)

1 person liked it

"Clearly she knew that between book lovers, a novel is not a novel is not a novel. It's a symbol, an offering -- and sometimes a test"
— Sara Nelson (So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading)

1 person liked it

Melissa's quotes

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