"...one of the secret masters of
the world: a librarian. They
control information. Don't ever p**s one off. _The Callahan Touch_
"
— Spider Robinson

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

"Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind."
— Richard Powers

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
— Malcolm X

"Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
— Voltaire

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."
— John Berger (Keeping a Rendezvous)

"We live for books."
— Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Books may well be the only true magic."
— Alice Hoffman

"Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity"
— George Steiner

"The heart is a bloody thing. "
— Toby Barlow

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
— Plato

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

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

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

"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

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
— Mark Twain

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

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"I cannot live without books."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

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

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
— William Styron

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."
— Stephen King

"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."
— Arnold Lobel

"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
— Garrison Keillor

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Is this a kissing book?"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."
— Terry Pratchett

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

"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)

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book."
— Jane Smiley (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel)

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page."
— Jane Hamilton

"I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family, and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.""
— Thomas Jefferson