Book Stacks Quotes & Sayings

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks. — Michael Dirda

Not even for a million dollars would I paint a tree. — Willem De Kooning

I've never gone back to the stacks after my book's expiration at the front of the store. Not because I'm above it or anything, but I'd be mortified if someone caught me looking for my own book. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love. — Jess Walter

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves! — Jan Karon

Most of us die with our music underplayed ... We should try to step out of our comfort zones and do the things we're capable of. — Mary Kay Ash

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks. — Sergey Brin

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site - stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct. — Jane Smiley

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left. — John Cage

I find research fascinating and always conduct some before I begin writing, and then fill in the rest as needed. I read stacks of books and also had the opportunity to travel to England to do more research. — Julie Klassen

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book and then making up my own mind. - Rick Moody — Jay Allison

One of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret. — Dean Koontz

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library. — John D'Agata

We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing. — Jeb Bush

But what struck me was the book-madness of the place
books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper. — Steven Millhauser

Abracadabra," Roarke stated, and opened it.
"Now that's more like it." Hunkered down beside him, Eve studied the neat stacks of cash. "This is how he stayed out of a cage so long. No credit, no e-transfers. Cash on the line. And a file box, loaded with discs and vids."
"Best of all." Roarke reached in, took out a PPC. "His personal palm, very likely uninfected and chock-full of interesting data."
"Let's load it up, get it in." She pulled out her memo book.
"What're you doing?"
"Logging the entry. I better not see any of that green stuff or those baubles go into your pockets, Ace."
"Now I'm offended." He straightened, brushed at his shirt. "If I nipped anything, you can bet your ass you wouldn't see me do it. — J.D. Robb

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.) — George Steiner

I missed you, little one. I didn't even know how much until I saw you. — Ella Maise

He saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something - someone - else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while THAT someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor's sleep. — Paul Harding

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink. — Dara Horn

And if there was any doubt, the events of the previous year - in Ferguson, Baltimore, and North Charleston - clearly showed that race still mattered in America, but black lives seemed not to. — Herb Frazier

In a chaotic world, U.S. diplomats will probably have even less contact with the people they need to reach. — David Ignatius

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books ... They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables ... I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is. — Louise Erdrich

For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web. — Marissa Mayer

When I first thought of being a writer I had visions of stacks of books in stores with my name on them, that sort of thing. But I never imagined this would be the reaction. — Augusten Burroughs

Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy.
[Harry Potter Beyond the Page: A Virtual Author Visit with J.K. Rowling (Scholastic / Stacks webcast, October 11, 2012)] — J.K. Rowling

A government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it. — Nelson Mandela

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows — Joseph Patrick Pascale

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise. — Peter Drucker

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal. — Harper Lee

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened. — David Lynch

Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It's not the book you start with, it's the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, "Nothing is more important than an unread library." Don't worry about doing research. Just search. — Austin Kleon

An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move. — William Stafford

The library was home away from home to my mom, and my family. We had spent every Sunday afternoon there since I was a little boy, wandering around the stacks, pulling out every book with a picture of a pirate ship, a knight, a soldier, or an astronaut. My mom used to say, This is my church, Ethan. This is how we keep the Sabbath holy in our family. — Kami Garcia

I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak. — Sarah Jio

I haven't read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could've read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don't mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough that you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that's not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones, and at least a few of those, like anything, must be good and worth reading. — Roberto Bolano

I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement. — Mike Royer

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. — Laini Taylor