Bookshelf Quotes

“I've squeezed as many bookcases in this tiny space as possible. Being surrounded by books and magazines makes me feel calm. It makes the room seem wrapped in a layer of protection. As if nothing or no one can get to me.”
― Angelo Surmelis, The Dangerous Art of Blending In

“I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me.”
― Robert William Service, Ballads of a Bohemian

“And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them.”
― Ross King, Ex-Libris

“Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.”
― Ryan Lilly

“We are improved by reading books not by owning them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We find paradise in every library and bookshop.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“If you do not keep on sorting your books, your books unsort themselves”
― Georges Perec, Thoughts of Sorts

“My books are my brain and my heart made visible.”
― Merilyn Simonds, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: A Book Lover Bridges the Digital Divide

“No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.”
― Kyoko Yoshida

“My father always says, to know a man, you must visit his library, for the contours of his mind have been shaped by the words on his bookshelf”
― Rehan Khan, A Tudor Turk

“The Only Thing,
I Like In Any House,
Is a Book shelf.”
― Aqeel Rafique

“I am so obsessed with my life that the books I used to read are resting in the bookshelf for years and my soul is dying in the arms of my life.”
― Neymat Khan

“I see the beatitudes of books displayed on a bookshelf.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present — and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser — but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all.”
― Jack Iams, Table For Four

“There are many books, but One holy book, the HOLY BIBLE.”
― Lailah Gifty, Akita

“Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped to the foot.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Dogeared pages means someone is reading a paperback...”
― Nanette L. Avery