Bibliophile Quotes & Sayings

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was
she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library
a lot like being in love for the first time. — Robert Jackson Bennett

Writing is bibliophile heroin. — Seanan McGuire

She wanted to own a book so badly and she had thought the copying would do it. But the pencilled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked. — Betty Smith

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape. — Frazier Glenn Miller

You'll enjoy it. There is much you can learn from books and scrolls," said Jeod. He gestured at the walls. "These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life."
"It sounds intriguing," admitted Eragon.
"Always the scholar, aren't you?" asked Brom.
Jeod shrugged. "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile. — Christopher Paolini

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing. — David S.E. Zapanta

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs. — Anne Fadiman

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She's a complete bibliophile, so I've pretty much grown up around libraries and books. — Paula Gruben

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends - books - it's because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: "What did they think of us?" - "Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?" - "Did they like us?" - nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading. — Marcel Proust

I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings. — Natalie Clifford Barney

I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time. — Gabrielle Zevin

Done to death by books? There were worse ways to go, even if you weren't a bibliophile. — Martin Edwards

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this. — Charles Bukowski

Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars — Holless Wilbur Allen

We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun. — Kevin Smokler

Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the same person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness instead of pain. — Haidji

That must be something to discover a book that nobody's ever heard of or everybody thought was lost."
"It's every bibliophile's dream," said Francis, and Peter knew in a second that it was his own. — Charlie Lovett

Well, I've always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I'll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on my chest and a seraphic smile of peace and contentment smoothing out all the ugliness of my visage... — E. Norman Torry

Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile."
"A what?" asked Eragon.
"One who loves books," explained Jeod. — Christopher Paolini

sometimes stories and books are all that we need to take us away — Susan Ornbratt

But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile's soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all. — Michael Cox

There is nothing like the smell of books, both new and old. If someone ever bottled the smell, I would be all over it . — Tiffany King

As any avid reader knew, a good read deserved a good seat. — David S.E. Zapanta

A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven. — E. Norman Torry

The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. — Anne Fadiman

Page after page she read
She cried and laughed
She swore and cheered
She fell in love with simple characters
She loathed imaginary enemies
She read and read saying one more chapter
She fell asleep with the books in her grasp
She got lost in the words and escaped the world — N.S.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book. — Neil Gaiman

Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete. — Barbara Wersba

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her. — Pat Conroy

George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine. — Anne Fadiman

The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave. — Henry Ward Beecher

She was a bibliophile - she would be perfectly happy never talking to another human being again as long as she had books to read. — Brenda L. Harper

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. — Gustave Flaubert

Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation - a gnawing familiarity - that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story. — Kate Bernheimer

Mom, I feel good. This dress makes me feel like someone I didn't know I could be. I've never owned anything like it. But if when you see this - when you see me- you think it's a pity, that it's a shame I didn't lose a few, then screw you, Mom. Try harder. — Julie Murphy

A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography. — Karl Kraus

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste. — Voltaire

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. — Barbara W. Tuchman

As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown. — Laura Whitcomb

I was in a bibliophile's Eylsium. — Walter Moers

A sea of dreams trapped in a span of pressed pages — Laura Whitcomb

What's your favorite book?" he mocks, lifting his head back up. "Asking a bibliophile that question is pure evil. There's no way I can choose only one, and if you make me choose one, you're forcing me to betray the hundreds of other books that have knocked me on my ass and shaped my soul. If you ask me that, you're the devil. — Rachael Wade

I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent. — Sherman Alexie

There was nothing as romantic as the feel of a book in your hands. — Brittainy C. Cherry

A serious bibliophile never lends his books. In fact he does not even read his books, for fear of wearing them out. — Gerard De Nerval

To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones. — Will Thomas

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books? — Laini Taylor

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

She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds. — Shannon Hale

For me, every book is an individual with its own identity and has to be nurtured and taken care
of, so that it may survive for a longer period. — Anurag Shourie

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices. — William Lyon Phelps

Ryodan says softly, "Holy strawberries, Dani, we're in a jam."
I look at him like he's sprouted two heads. Holy strawberries? In a jam? Even Barrons looks stumped.
He continues, "But don't worry. Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods - you really butchered that one, by the way - I've got it in the bag. How about this one: holy borrowing bibliophile, let's book. — Karen Marie Moning

He pinched the remaining chapters' pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book. — David S.E. Zapanta

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves. — Will Thomas

I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are ... — Roberto Bolano

This place might have been paradise, a treasure trove far greater than any to be found in a pirate yarn.
Everywhere he looked there were books.
They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather, and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold. — Lavie Tidhar

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense. — Norman MacCaig