Bookshelf Quotes & Sayings

My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games - he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of Decemebr; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey. — Nick Hornby

Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present - and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser - but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all. — Jack Iams

When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it ... Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. — Nora Ephron

Self-control is an exhaustible resource. This is a crucial realization, because when we talk about "self-control," we don't mean the narrow sense of the word, as in the willpower needed to fight vice (smokes, cookies, alcohol). We're talking about a broader kind of self-supervision. Think of the way your mind works when you're giving negative feedback to an employee, or assembling a new bookshelf, or learning a new dance. You are careful and deliberate with your words or movements. It feels like there's a supervisor on duty. That's self-control, too. — Chip Heath

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. — Stephen Fry

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland — Arthur Conan Doyle

We are born an empty bookshelf.
Life is what we fill it with. — Felicia Day

I have on my bookshelf a series of books with opposite titles: 'The Alpha Strategy' and the 'Omega Strategy'; 'Asia Rising' and 'Asia Falling'; 'Free to Choose' and 'Free to Lose'; 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' and 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.' Visitors love the collection. — Mark Skousen

Brad got me this great thing for Christmas. It's a bookshelf that has a book on every religion. That's how we plan to raise our kids. Teach them about all religions. They can pick one or be a student of all of them. We'll celebrate Kwanzaa for our girl. We'll celebrate moon and water festivals for our boys. We'll take them to temples in certain countries. Also to church. — Angelina Jolie

Honey, have you seen my measuring tape?"
"I think it's in that drawer in the kitchen with the scissors, matches, bobby pins, Scotch tape, nail clippers, barbecue tongs, garlic press, extra buttons, old birthday cards, soy sauce packets thick rubber bands, stack of Christmas napkins, stained take-out menus, old cell-phone chargers, instruction booklet for the VCR, some assorted nickels, an incomplete deck of cards, extra chain links for a watch, a half-finished pack of cough drops, a Scrabble piece I found while vacuuming, dead batteries we aren't fully sure are dead yet, a couple screws in a tiny plastic bag left over from the bookshelf, that lock with the forgotten combination, a square of carefully folded aluminum foil, and expired pack of gum, a key to our old house, a toaster warranty card, phone numbers for unknown people, used birthday candles, novelty bottle openers, a barbecue lighter, and that one tiny little spoon."
"Thanks, honey."
AWESOME! — Neil Pasricha

When Maddie prepared for bed behind her screen that night, she emerged to find the most terrible sight yet.

"Oh, really, Logan. That just isn't fair."
He looked up from his reclines pose in her bedroom chaise longue, his face partly covered behind a book bound in dark green leather. "What?"

"You're reading Pride and Prejudice?"

He shrugged. "I found it on your bookshelf."
Seeing him read any book was bad enough. But her favorite book? This was sheer torture.

"Just promise me something, please," she said.

"What's that?"

"Just promise me that I'm not going to come out from around this screen one night and find you holding a baby." That seemed the only possibility more devastating to her self-control.

"He chucked. "It doesna seem likely."

"Good. — Tessa Dare

You could eat sushi off my bookshelf. My cleaning regime is like a battleground. I'm Genghis Khan and my cleaning products are my Mongolian army and I take no prisoners. The rest of my life is an experiment in chaos so I like to keep my flat neat. — Ryan Adams

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

I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf. — Rex Stout

The dragon flew up and settled in the crook of Mina's hood, and quickly became invisible again.
"I don't trust that thing," Jared shot back.
"Relax, I find him quite cute. Isn't that right, Ander?" She held up a finger and felt the invisible dragon rub its face against her.
"Great, you've named it, now you're gonna want to keep it. But I'm telling you that thing better be house-trained." He turned to the bookshelf and began to pull open the book to open the hidden exit door.
Mina felt Ander leave her shoulder but didn't let Jared know he was missing. She saw Constance's teacup float mysteriously above Jared's head. She clapped her hand over her mouth to contain the laughter. A second later the cup turned over, spilling lukewarm tea on Jared's unsuspecting head.
"Oh, it better not have just peed on me!" he screamed. — Chanda Hahn

You ever buy a book and not read it? You feel almost guilty having it up on a bookshelf. People are like, "Hey, how's that book?" "I haven't read it." "Oh, did you just buy it?" "I've had it since high school." "Well, can I borrow it?" "No." — Jim Gaffigan

I had definitely never heard of anyone peeing in a cup and leaving it in their own office on a bookshelf to evaporate and be absorbed back into their body through the pores on their face. — Tina Fey

I see the beatitudes of books displayed on a bookshelf. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me. — Ellen Potter

Adventures are funny things.
Some streak down upon you like a storm.
Others emerge after many years have passed and something forgotten is revealed.
They can be discovered on a dusty bookshelf or the yellowed pages of an ancient map.
They promise great reward, but no adventure is without risk. — Wayne Thomas Batson

Don Raimondo tells me what he can't tell them. "The emptiness on the surface of a wall left by a sold bookshelf is the deepest I know. I take away with me the banished books, I give them a second life. Like the second coat in painting, used for finishing, a book's second life is its best." He's rescued the library of a lover of American literature. — Erri De Luca

I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation. — Lupe Fiasco

Secondhand booksellers and binder's shops ran in uneven rows on either side of me, jumbled and jostled together like an ill-kept bookshelf. — Douglas Hulick

You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf. Because what you're feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. the way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what is sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms. Joel Salatin — Michael Pollan

All books are hyggelig, but classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens have a special place on the bookshelf. At the right age, your kids may also love to cuddle up with you in the hyggekrog and have you read to them. Probably not Tolstoy. — Meik Wiking

A novel is a hearty meal, but poems are the Belgian chocolates of the bookshelf. You can pick one and linger over it. Savour the aroma, the taste, the melting texture, the sweet craving it leaves behind! Or you can scoff down as many as you can eat. It's up to you. — Vicky Arthurs

In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself. — Chris Abani

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

She has a bookshelf for a heart, and ink runs through her veins, she'll write you into her story with the typewriter in her brain. Her bookshelf's getting crowded. With all the stories that's she's penned, of all the people who flicked through her pages but closed the book before it ended. And there's one pushed to the very back, that sits collecting dust, with its title in her finest writing, 'The One's Who Lost My Trust'. There's books shes scared to open, and books she doesn't close. Stories of every person she's met stretched out in endless rows. Some people have only one sentence while others once held a main part, thousands of inky footprints that they've left across her heart. You might wonder why she does this, why write of people she once knew? But she hopes one day she'll mean enough for someone to write about her too. — E.H.

My mother wrote a couple of romances when I was a kid, and I always saw books in our bookshelf with 'Schroeder' on the spine. — Karl Schroeder

Who said I was going to give it to you?" He smiled and took a step toward me. "Maybe I have secret love for Fitzwilliam Darcy. We do share a name. I also need to get a gift for someone who would love it."
"If I can't have it, no one can." I narrowed my eyes in mock threat.
"Is that so?"
"You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers." I backed into the bookshelf behind me.
"Maybe I just need to distract you long enough to steal it." He put a hand on the shelf by my head.
"And how do you plan on doing that?" I licked my lips.
"I have a few ideas." He moved his other hand, caging me in, and leaned down. — Nichole Chase

There is more to life than a job. I didn't ever want to look back and point to a bookshelf of videotapes and say, 'That's been my life.' It's so much easier to write a resume than it is to craft a spirit. — Jane Clayson

You can read minds, and you didn't tell me?" Link stared at me like he just found out I was the Silver Surfer. He rubbed his head nervously. "Hey, man, all that stuff about Lena? I was yankin' your chain." He looked away. "Are you doin' it now? You're doin' it, aren't you? Dude, get out of my head." He backed away from me and into the bookshelf.
"I can't read your mind, you idiot. — Kami Garcia

A framed photo on a dusty bookshelf caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently. A small girl with long blond hair was standing under a tree, her face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across her face, framing it.
A willow tree. Willow. — L.A. Weatherly

I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know. — Jeff Zentner

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf
felt akin to an instance of religious grace. — Jonathan Franzen

I looked at the titles on the bookshelf and found a book on Greek mythology next to a book of poetry, which was flanked by a book on German philosophy. "How are these organized?"
"They're not."
I turned to him. "How do you find anything? There must be thousands of books here."
"I like the search. It's like visiting old friends. — Julianne Donaldson

Clary raised her eyebrows at Jace. "You hate bergamot?"
Jace had wandered over to the narrow bookshelf and was examining its contents. "You have a problem with that?"
"You may be the only guy my age I've ever met who knows what bergamot is, much less that it's in Earl Grey tea."
"Yes, well," Jace said, with a supercilious look, "I'm not like other guys. Besides," he added, flipping a book off the shelf, "at the Institute we have to take classes in basic medicinal uses for plants. It's required."
"I figured all your classes were stuff like Slaughter 101 and Beheading for Beginners. — Cassandra Clare

I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf. — Philipp Meyer

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended. — Holly Black

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books. — Roald Dahl

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!). — Tony Reinke

She studies the endless rows of titles on the bookshelf, then whirls toward me. "Okay. Admit it."

"Admit what?"

She points an accusing finger at me. "You're smart."

I snort loudly. "Of course I'm smart."

"You sure as hell don't act like it." Allie crosses her arms over the front of her loose striped sweater. "In fact, I feel like you go out of your way to make everyone believe you're a dummy. With your 'baby dolls' and foul language and the way you throw 'ain't' into a sentence every so often."

I flash her a grin. "Nope, that's just how I fucking talk, baby doll. Ain't nothing wrong with that. — Elle Kennedy

He had the tool to break down the walls that imprisoned his people. He had the tool to rip away the veil to the Holy of Holies so that his flock could come before the Lord and be cleansed, made whole, transformed, and have a personal, loving relationship with their creator. That very tool san on Hannah's bookshelf right now, gathering dust until Sunday morning. Her Savior was there, waiting to speak to her and show her the way home again, the way back to love. YOUR WORD IS LIFE! Why didn't more people understand that? — Francine Rivers

Each and every one of us has moments like these, times when a book becomes more than a book. It is a touchstone and the stories between the pages are reflections of us. They remind us of who we were, who we are now and how we got there. The next time you have a bout of nostalgia, I encourage you not to pull out the old photo album. Head to your bookshelf instead, and see what surfaces. I guarantee it will be more than you think.

The pen is mightier than a lot of things. The sword was just the first one down. — Emily Asher-Perrin

Because who wants an incredibly written book sitting on their bookshelf if they have to stare at a shitty cover? — Colleen Hoover

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

A bookshelf is a biography written by others. — Kat Lehmann

I source images and ideas from different parts of my experiences, and sometimes they are things that are made-up, or just appear out of nowhere, like out of a dream or an image that I've seen in a book, or even the title of a book that I'm staring at on a shelf. It's a good way to write songs, just stare at a bookshelf! — Julia Stone

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf. — Sarah MacLean

I don't choose between my house phone and my mobile. I don't choose between my laptop and my notebook. And I don't intend to choose between my e-reader and my bookshelf. — Sara Sheridan

I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else. — Steve Martin

My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf. — Michael Easton

The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams's The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin's Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta's Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else. — Rod Dreher

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees. — Haruki Murakami

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time. — Christopher Bollen

Ask anyone with a big book collection, and they'll tell you moving them was the hardest part of the move. Take down a bookshelf and there's often no less than four, possibly up to eight, good Lord if it's over ten, boxes of dense material. This is the single greatest argument for welcoming ebooks. Abandoning print and having your Kindle on display instead doesn't sound like such a bad idea while carrying book box number seven to the car. — Lauren Leto

When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf. — Neil Gaiman

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf. — Justin Cronin

Every stylish man should have a copy of 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand on his bookshelf. — Orlando Bloom

I'd give you some pants, but I don't wear any," a mage standing by a bookshelf remarked sympathetically. — Andrey Vasilyev

Out of habit, she stopped by the bookshelf in the living room to see if there was a paperback that she could stuff into her pocket for emergencies - you never knew when you might need a book to entertain and comfort and distract you in the day's empty places — Emily Croy Barker

I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf. — Nick Harkaway

My books are my brain and my heart made visible. — Merilyn Simonds

I have on my bookshelf a book called 'Movie Monsters' by Alan Ormsby, a kids' book I got when I was in kindergarten. It started there. — Jason Henderson

The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become — Sheridan Hay

We find paradise in every library and bookshop. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf. — Robin Sloan

The rules have changed. True power is held by the person who possesses the largest bookshelf, not gun cabinet or wallet. — Anthony J. D'Angelo

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

The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined. — Henry Petroski

The Dick, Jane, and Spot primers have gone to that bookshelf in the sky. I have, in some ways, a tender feeling toward them, so I think it's for the best. — Chris Van Allsburg

I fell so damn hard, Tenleigh. Standing right at this bookshelf. I gave you my heart and you weren't even in the room. — Mia Sheridan

The cleanest book on a dusty bookshelf is usually a dirty one. — Ashwin Sanghi

Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth
and surprising reality
of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably. — Steven Saylor

I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it's started to thrive. — Margaret Stohl

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content. — Jeanette Winterson

I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading. — Barbara Pym

Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. — Roald Dahl

The bookshelf in my heart holds many titles. So can yours. — Sylvia McNicoll

Another bad cure is the sentence awkwardly stretched out by a "that" or "which" clause. For example, "Leaping from the couch he seized the revolver from the bookshelf that stood behind the armchair," or, "She turned, shrieking, throwing up her arms in terror at the sight of the gorilla that had arrive that morning from Africa, which had formerly been its home." What happens in such sentences, obviously, is that they tend to trail off, lose energy. — John Gardner

Saskia's bedroom is messy and cramped, but in an eccentric, smart way. Books are stacked all over the floor, but her bookshelf is empty, suggesting that she is the kind of person who reads seventy-five books at once. — Greg Baxter

I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human. — Maggie Stiefvater

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. — Allison Hoover Bartlett

Every time I get mad, I grab my hammer and make a bookshelf or something. — Anthony Mackie

If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain. — Alexander Theroux

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. — Jamie Zawinski

I should have known," I said. "Silence seemed smart, but now he's made this huge."

Mr. Rasmus grunted. "We need a plan."

"We have a plan," I snapped. "Is there anything we really could have done besides marrying me off faster?"

General Leger stood with his back against a bookshelf, still staring at the blank screen. "We could kill him."

I sighed. "I really don't want that to be my go-to move. — Kiera Cass

Now how do we know you're really from Edenton?" he said.
"And the point of lying would be?" Gabriel asked. "So we could have a complete stranger chauffeur us to another complete stranger's house for proper English tea at," he looked at a clock on the bookshelf, "two in the morning? Mia, he's discovered our nefarious plan."
Edgar rubbed his black shorn hair and squinted at Gabriel "Smartass teenagers. My favorite. — Elisa Nader

You prefer the bed on the opposite wall?"
"I prefer the bookshelf in the lower left corner of the room, and the ceiling fan not to be hanging over my head while I sleep."
"OCD?"
"Feng shui."
"Is it contagious?"
"Hardly anyone gets it. — Devon Monk

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again. — Michael Dirda

I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me. — Robert W. Service

Thwack. The nail drove deeper, as if Montgomery was driving it into my very heart. How hard was it to fix a loose nail? He hit it again and again, determined to set that bookshelf straight. Determined to do something right, after so much wrong. — Megan Shepherd

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work. — Rashid Johnson

The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted. — Richard Rodriguez

I have a nice bookshelf in my office, but not my house. I'm crass, but not that crass. — Jerry Seinfeld

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. — Gary Shteyngart

I had to put this slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort. — Bret Easton Ellis