Addiction To Books Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. — Walter Moers

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.'
'Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

A life without books is like body without a soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The trouble with bookshops is that they are as bad as pubs. You start at one and then you drift to another, and before you know where you are you are on a gigantic book-binge. My brief case was full to bursting and I had bundles of books under both arms. I was bowed down by the weight of them. — R.T. Campbell

I was going to be one of those crazy ladies with fifty cats, a recliner, and a coupon addiction. Except my cats were going to be books. Books were way less stinky than cats. — Cambria Hebert

Bookworms are the most precious worms in the world when they are humans, feeding upon the paper's body with their starving minds. — Munia Khan

In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We're getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It's no myth! — Christopher Dines

If someone's going to publish a book about addiction, it has to say something new and different. It has to be something we haven't read before. A lot of these books are published because the writing is wonderful. The Frey book has superb writing, and that can be enough to sell a book. — Charles Adams

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside. — Lorna Sage

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. — Phillip Adams

It was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine. — Regina O'Melveny

I'm pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level. — Colleen Hoover

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner. — Haruki Murakami

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.
(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010) — Gail Carriger

For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life. — Mordecai Richler

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of. — Paul Auster

Books are worse than wine, I say. You read one and you need another - there's no end to it. What ails you that you cannot content yourself with just living on under the sun? — Donna Gillespie

Seeking for salvation within covers with pages of printed letters — D.Kadie

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already. — Anthony Powell

Purple Mike promises to be an intriguing read that will teach anyone who wants to know about the highs and lows of drug addiction. Purple Mike is a legal, natural high. Enjoy reading. — Sin Mils

Some books you read and savor. Some, you carry close to your heart. — S.R. McKade

Lucy: Yes, as usual I bought so many books that my food budget ran out. I was left with no choice but to eat bread crusts. But! On the other hand, this means that I was able to feed my word addiction! I feel no shame whatsoever about eating bread crusts!

Hasebe: Have a little shame. — Karino Takatsu

It's strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next.
After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless.
We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete.
We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives.
The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They're everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives. — Christopher Hawke

My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams — Larry Smith

She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided that she'd been "forbidden" to fertilize Walter's flowers after what had happened "last time. — Jonathan Franzen

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning. — Beth Pattillo

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere — Karina Cooper

This must be what an addict feels like, I think,
trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story. — Jodi Picoult

Once I began a book, I couldn't put it down. It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. — Haruki Murakami

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take. — John Clellon Holmes

Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz