"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."
— Peter S. Jennison

"Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?"
— Christopher Paolini

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

"Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... "
— Neil Gaiman

"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
— C.S. Lewis

"When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began."
— Rita Mae Brown

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
-- Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart Trilogy: Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath)

"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."
— Mark Twain

"I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once."
— C.S. Lewis

"The world was hers for the reading."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

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

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

"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

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."
— C.S. Lewis

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

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"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

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkspell)

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

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."
— Anne Herbert

"When you read a book as a child,it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does..."
— Nora Ephron

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
— Mortimer J. Adler

"The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more."
— Patricia A. McKillip (The Bell at Sealey Head)

"My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."
— François Mauriac

"There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book."
— Betty MacDonald (Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic)

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"In reading we must become creators."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"There are too many books in the world to read in a single life time. You have to draw the line somewhere."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water)

"I am a part of everything that I have read."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.

For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress."
— Julie Powell (Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen)