Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
~ Francis Bacon
A book is good company.
It is full of conversation without loquacity.
It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
~ Henry Ward Beecher
The lessons taught in great books are misleading.
The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
~ Anita Brookner
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
~ Thomas Carlyle
What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
~ Lewis Carroll
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
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
~ E. M. Forster
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you;
the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
~ Ernest Hemingway
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors.
There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
~ James Russell Lowell
Style and Structure are the essence of a book;
great ideas are hogwash.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
~ Ezra Pound
The real risks for any artist are taken... in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think.
Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it - when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
~ Salman Rushdie
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
~ John Ruskin
What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
That doesn't happen much, though.
~ J. D. Salinger
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
~ Henry David Thoreau
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river;
while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
~ Marina Tsvetaeva