Books On A Shelf Quotes & Sayings

You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it. — Diana Gabaldon

Books are what you step on to take you to a higher shelf. The higher your stack of books, the higher the shelf you can reach. Want to reach higher? Stack some more books under your feet! Reading is what brings us to new knowledge. It opens new doors. It helps us understand mysteries. It lets us hear from successful people. Reading is what takes us down the road in our journey. Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. — Jim Rohn

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. — Anne Fadiman

Demon. Gremlin. Poltergeist. Ghost. Phantom. Spirit. Shadow. Ghoul. Devil. People are afraid of them, so they relegate their existence to stories, volumes of books that can be closed and put on the shelf or left behind at a bed and breakfast; they clench their eyes shut, so they will see no evil. But trust me when I tell you that the zebra is real. Somewhere, the zebra is dancing. — Garth Stein

If it occurred to Thursey that there was really no relationship between marrying your own true love and having a fortune showered upon you, she didn't bother about that. In a story you might as well have both, it was make-believe anyway.
But if I had to choose, she thought. If I had to choose ... she stared at her ragged dress hanging from its hook, and her ragged mended sandals on the shelf, then put the books away. How would I ever have such a choice, except in a made-up story? — Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain ... It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren't books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books? — Holly Black

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. — David Quammen

I am a book reviewer. I write for a glossy magazine called 'SCI FI.' The money is not life-changing, but it's a low-stress gig. Publishers send me their books. More than I could possibly read. I pick a few and write about them, put a very few others on the shelf, to be perused at my leisure, someday. — Adam-Troy Castro

The room was as big as the Duke of Pardloe's library and had at least as many books, and yet the feeling of it was more akin to a small cluttered hole (Pardloe's)
You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not, Books that were usedhad an open, interested feel to them, even when closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order. You felt as though the book took on as much interest in you as you did in it and it was willing you to reach for it. — Diana Gabaldon

I simply believe that a book has a journey to make, and should not be condemned to being stuck on a shelf ... Let's leave our books free to travel, then, to be touched by other hands, and enjoyed by other eyes. — Paulo Coelho

Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread. — Stella Gibbons

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver. — Amos Oz

The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax. — Tim Berners-Lee

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn't make sense to myself, or to the world outside. — Pico Iyer

I was a voracious reader and the library fed my curiosity, imagination and my soul. I read by the shelf - biographies, fantasy - all and everything fed my dreams. Then as an adult whenever I would go on location the first thing we would do as a family is sign up at the closest library. Not only would we find books, but what was happening in that town, because the library is the head of the community. — Susan Sarandon

The despair in books was a distant, safe thing. She'd thought she understood the depth of the emotion as she read through the pages of her beloved books, her life touching those of men and women long dead. She's felt for them, cried for them, tried to breathe for them when they no longer breathed. And then, she'd been able to close the book and place it on its shelf, the word trapped between the leather covers.
Oh, sometimes it had taken her hours or days to recover from a particularly emotional book, but there'd always be another to take her mind off the anguish.
There were no books here. — Cynthia Hand

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you. — Sarah Erdman

Douglas has more books- and comic books- than anyone I know. Still, if you wanted to borrow one, and took it down off the shelf and forgot to mention it to him, Douglas would notice right away it was missing, even though there are maybe a thousand other ones that look exactly like it right on the shelf beside it. Douglas is one of those books people — Meg Cabot

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. "Hurry," they say, "he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

I can remember that on the shelves at home, there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. 'Look Homeward Angel' and 'Of Time and the River.' 'Of Time and the River' had just come out when I was aware of his name. My parents had a hard time convincing me that he was no kin whatsoever. My attitude was, 'Well, what's he doing on the shelf, then?' — Tom Wolfe

Having books standing on a shelf in a room is like having completely different worlds at the ready, waiting to be explored. — J.F Hermann

Sure, I've always been into the Big Bang theory of passion, but as something thoretical, something that happens in books that you can close and put back on a shelf, something that I might secretly want bad but can't imagine ever happening to me. — Jandy Nelson

Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like ... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [ ... ] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading. — Tim O'Brien

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty. — Garrison Keillor

I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years - and I wonder what the child care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there's been some secret division of the world's women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits - to show she's advanced to the breeder caste and can't be sent out to clean anymore. — Barbara Ehrenreich

She looked up and smiled. "I'm glad you found some books that interest you. Would you like a glass of lemonade?"
Though I was hoping to thank her for the books and be on my way, I didn't want to seem rude. I nodded and set the stack of books on the counter. While Miz Goodpepper pulled a pitcher from the refrigerator, I asked, "Is the Kama Sutra a volcano?"
She gasped and splashed lemonade across the kitchen counter. The strangest look streaked across her face as she sopped up the mess with a wad of paper towels. "Well, I suppose some might think it's a volcano of sorts, but I can say with absolute assurance you wouldn't enjoy that book."
"That's what I thought," I said, feeling pleased with myself, so I put it back on the shelf.
She let out a barely audible sigh. "Good. — Beth Hoffman

If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing. — Jim Rohn

The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books. — Matthew Tobin Anderson

I'm much more willing to buy a novel electronically by someone I don't know. Because if halfway through I think, I don't really like this, I can just stop. I can't throw books out, even if I think they're crummy. I feel like I've got to give it to the library. I've got to loan it to somebody, or I keep it on my shelf. It's like a plant. — Susan Orlean

The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear. — James Lane Allen

Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn't come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way, shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page
the next shelf, stack, or box
and that was part of the pleasure of it. — Sam Savage

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

Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued ... was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies. Next, — Robert Louis Stevenson

I," I start, and she turns to look at my lips moving, rehearsing for some grand proposal. "I think it'd be good idea if you brought a few books over and left them on my shelf." I'm a writer, and this is as good as it gets. She didn't need a ring, just the ability to borrow a bookmark whenever she needed, or unwritten or unspoken permission to take my copy of Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger with the original cover. — Darnell Lamont Walker

All of us can think of a book ... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us. — Katherine Paterson

In the Library"

for Octavio


There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does. — Charles Simic

See, I know how they do. White folks like to stay in those books. They carry and they keep and they dig in their books, like nothing matters that don't get written in some book somewhere. Like that's the only way they can know for sure what happened. They'll write down who they are and what they did. And their daddies and theirs too. Put it all in a book, then close it up and put it on the shelf. Just to know it's there so they can sleep at night. Like if they don't get written down somewhere and they shut their eyes for a minute, they might disappear. — Margaret Wrinkle

I've carried on, in that same tradition, with my kids. Aside from just his brilliance, in my estimation, I think he had one of the great imaginations of the 20th century. One of the reasons why the tradition carries on, all these years later, is because, as a parent, those are the books that you go to and pull off the shelf because they never stop delighting you. — Christopher Meledandri

The juggler seemed worried. "Throw it a book," he said.

I threw it a book, and it tore into it, like a cat ripping a small animal apart; and while the creature ate its book the juggler pushed the door open. He nearly fell into a deep chasm on the other side. "Not a disaster," he said, as if he was trying to convince himself. "We need more books. Big books."

It didn't seem like a good time for reading, but I pulled two huge old books off the shelf in the corner and carried them over to him. He took one, but didn't read it. He told it what a bad book it was and threw it on the ground. The book bounced in the air and hung there quivering, and the juggler man jumped onto it and began to float away. "As long as they think you don't like them," said the juggler, "they migrate back to the library. And we get a free ride."

I rode next to him on my book, and we crossed the chasm safely. The books floated away and I waved them good-bye. — Neil Gaiman

I use a library the same way I've been describing the creative process as a writer - I don't go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life. — Ray Bradbury

It's not even so much about publicity, it's more just letting people know that things are available, because books aren't a flash in the pan thing. It's more like: "It took 20 years for this book to be done and now it'll be on a shelf for 20 years until the right person finds it." — Ian Christe

I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens. — Anne McCaffrey

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end — Rachel Caine

I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books. — Joan Didion

When you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Books, of which the principles are diseased or deformed, must be kept on the shelf of the scholar, as the man of science preserves monsters in glasses. They belong to the study of the mind's morbid anatomy, and ought to be accurately labelled. Voltaire will still be a wit, notwithstanding he is a scoffer; and we may admire the brilliant spots and eyes of the viper, if we acknowledge its venom and call it a reptile. — Robert Aris Willmott

'Jane Eyre' must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And 'Kristin Lavransdatter,' and 'Lorna Doone' when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it. — Sue Miller

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. — Henry Miller

Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree? — Christopher Paolini

I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. — Peter Abrahams

She dampened her lips. "I . . . I have defenses you don't know of, and" - she gestured to the half wall revealing the kitchen beyond - "I have pepper spray in the kitchen."
"Pepper spray in the kitchen," he said tonelessly.
"All right, all right!" She dropped the bag with the box on a coffee table that held a few large picture books on the Old West and hurried into the kitchen, coming back with the pepper spray, which she stuck on a bookcase shelf next to the door. He took it down and checked the expiration date. "You should have tossed this two years ago. — Robin D. Owens

For people like me, books are something solid and real, whereas digital stuff is a bit more ethereal. I like the trophy on my shelf, the presence in my home. A nice book is just as valuable as a decoration as a beautiful porcelain urn - and, let's face it, a hell of a lot more useful. — John Romaniello

Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf. — Marc Maron

The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your shelf. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm. — Lauren Leto

So we go around pigeonholing everything. We put cows in cowsheds, horses in stables, pigs in pigsties, and chickens in chicken coops. The same happens when Sophie Amundsen tidies up her room. She puts her books on the bookshelf, her schoolbooks in her schoolbag, and her magazines in the drawer. She folds her clothes neatly and puts them in the closet - underwear on one shelf, sweaters on another, and socks in a drawer on their own. Notice that we do the same thing in our minds. we distinguish between things made of stone, things made of wool, and things made of rubber. We distinguish between things that are alive or dead, and we distinguish between vegetables, animal, and human — Jostein Gaarder

I go to the shelf and pick out a few poetry books to take with me. A few old favorites and a few I haven't gotten to yet. As I slip the books into my carry-on, it occurs to me that there really are a lot of poems about death, that I've always read many poems about dying, but had almost never noticed them before. They were always the ones I lightly skimmed, and I thought that maybe I could start reading these poems more carefully. It was almost nothing, but it was also a decision about my life. — Jacob Wren

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book. — James Hynes

Buying a book is not enough ... You must absorb the knowledge it contains. Your personalized knowledge is not what's on your shelf, but how much you put into yourself! — Israelmore Ayivor

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. — Annie Dillard

Rob's small room on the second floor of the Chapman Street house, a three-shelf bookcase was packed with black-and-white composition books, the front and back of each page filled with single-spaced notes from various classes. Tavarus thought, Damn, this is how you go places. — Jeff Hobbs

Do not judge a man by the books on his shelf that he has read but by the books on his shelf that he does not reread. — Anonymous

There are some men, Jepp, whose lives are like this
a single volume. Their story is seamless, without fissures or breaks. They live but one life. Then there are others, like you and me, whose lives are a series of volumes. Their stories stop and must be started up again. They must accept this is so, and put one book away on the shelf in order to start another. — Katherine Marsh

Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life. — Bob Newhart

Computers will never take the place of books. You can't stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf. — Sam Ewing

I'm no prophet, but I'm guessing that comic books will always be strong. I don't think anything can really beat the pure fun and pleasure of holding a magazine in your hand, reading the story on paper, being able to roll it up and put it in your pocket, reread again later, show it to a friend, carry it with you, toss it on a shelf, collect them, have a lot of magazines lined up and read them again as a series. I think young people have always loved that. I think they always will. — Stan Lee

The faint aroma of gum and calico that hangs about a library is as the fragrance of incense to me. I think the most beautiful sight is the gilt-edged backs of a row of books on a shelf. The alley between two well-stocked shelves in a hall fills me with the same delight as passing through a silent avenue of trees. The colour of a binding-cloth and its smooth texture gives me the same pleasure as touching a flower on its stalk. A good library hall has an atmosphere which elates. I have seen one or two University Libraries that have the same atmosphere as a chapel, with large windows, great trees outside, and glass doors sliding on noiseless hinges. — R.K. Narayan

Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. — Alberto Manguel

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. — Diane Setterfield

The books are all leather, and the titles are old. I pause at a collection of Shakespeare. Othello. Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night's Dream. I pull Hamlet out and look at it, but then set it back down on the shelf.
I pass a row of books on philosophy, and another on astrology. Up and down I go, pausing now and then, but not pulling any books out. I'm not sure what I expected to find. The Idiot's Guide to Time Travel? — Mandy Hubbard

Books about books are a rare species, special tomes for writers and book lovers. More than an affirmation of taste, a book about books is often a spirited celebration and sincere investigation. Quickly coveted, it remains on that particular shelf, guarded and revered, and eventually slips out of print. What good company we will keep then, among a library lost, only momentarily invisible, waiting patiently to be found. — Tom Cardamone

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, "good book," as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others. — Jack Gantos

The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it. — Philip Pullman

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf. — Erri De Luca

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves. — Jeanette Winterson

For is not a Book the most reliable of Companions
and generally among the most stimulating as well? No need to worry about amusing or pleasing or making a good impression on a Book, when its only purpose is to entertain and, perhaps, instruct. And if it should fail in that purpose, one can merely return it to its shelf, without so much as a by-your-leave and no occasion for anxiety about its wounded Pride, either. — Natalie Wexler

One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs. — Mary Roach

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.
WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again.
BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again.
PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed. — Christopher Morley