And I cannot lie!
If you read to the end of my emails to our lists, you might have seen the quotes I have included below my signature:
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. – E.B. White
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet. – Jhumpa Lahiri
A room without books is like a body without a soul. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Don’t you just love a succinct, brief line that encapsulates your thoughts perfectly? Bonus points if it’s funny! Some remarks are so accurate, as one from an author of books about many, many lives, George R. R. Martin, said, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Some are words to truly live by:
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. – Lemony Snicket
For me, it all goes back to the 8th grade, when I was given a paperback copy of The Left Handed Dictionary by Leonard Louis Levinson. Our middle school’s vice principal gave it to me when he was cleaning things out before summer break. I don’t know if he knew what he was doing by giving me this slim volume of bon mots.
The cover notes that The Left Handed Dictionary is “5,000 definitions that once tripped gaily off the slightly forked tongues of Fred Allen, Russell Baker, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, E. B. White, and others, not to mention L.L.L. himself.” Looking through it, you’ll find it’s a book of quotations unusually organized in dictionary style, with the subject of the quote being the defined word. So rather than quoting Gary Belkin saying “A book is a tool for sharpening the brain,” it’s laid out on the page as such:
CW: This little paperback is in no way comprehensive, and the notables being quoted are a small slice of the WASPy literary world that made Chautauqua all the rave. Note that it was published in 1963, so there are plenty of instances of dated language and ideas that we have all hopefully grown past. (Psst L.L.L.: We are “women,” not “girls.”) I tried to be careful in the examples I’ve included, but I know there will be some stinkers among the gems.
A Few Select Pages
Send Us Your Favorite Quotes
Do you have some pithy saying about reading decorating a t-shirt, plaque, or mug? Who is your favorite author you love to quote? Please share your favorite quotes about reading, books, libraries, or bookstores in the comments. Don’t forget to tell us who said what!
I have a couple of favorites. One is a classic from Jane Austen:
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”
The other is a quote from John Waters. When I was looking it up so that I would get the wording right, I discovered that there is a longer, more complex version, which I like better.
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t let them explore you until they’ve explored the secret universes of books. Don’t let them connect with you until they’ve walked between the lines on the pages.”
I’ve always loved that John Waters quote.
Me too. I used the simplified version of that quote on a picture of Waters as the header in one of our wrap-up posts on Pajiba. I thought it was pretty apropos for CBR.
agreed. a mantra to live by
That is awesome!
Here are the ones I have accessible right now:
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” – Jane Austen
“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.” – Patrick Rothfuss
“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.”
– Nora Ephron
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” – Charles Dickens
I like that Dickens one! I’ve never heard that one before.
I found it on a Tumblr post a while back for like sassy bookish quotes or something. It kind of cracked me up because you don’t picture Dickens being sassy very often.
I love Dickens, and I think he wasn’t above being catty now and then. Great quote.
“People who fall in love with books never really stop falling.”
― Rainbow Rowell
“Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are home”
– Anna Quindlen
(I have this one as a print at home)
Love both, but that Quindlen one is perfection.
The Book Thief: I have hated the words, and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.
Which I guess is more about writing than reading but still, love that quote.
I like that one. Sometimes I feel like that when I’m writing reviews.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx. 🙂
That is a perfect joke and an amazing quote 🙂
that one is a classic, for a reason.
But seriously, this one is more about writing but I’ve always liked it:
“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker is always good for a quote.
She is a bright light through LLL’s entire book.
Simple, yet accurate: “Books are a uniquely portable magic”, Stephen King.
I love this one!
I am also a quote collector from way back; my grandmother gave me my first bound journal for me to fill w them in 2nd grade and I haven’t stopped since (although I keep both a journal and Google docs separated by topic, now). Here are a few Of my favorite reading entries.
“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?” – Cornelia Funke
“This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting close.” Laurie Halse Anderson, The Wintergirls
“ Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of “them” & widen the circle of “us” And when one feels alone–say, because of a terrible burden of a secret, something that creates pain and isolation, books can heal, connect. That’s what good books do. That’s what hard books do. And we need them in the world” Libba Bray, Twitter, June 4, 2011
“ When I was reading a book as a child I never saw or heard or smelled anything around me, not friends coming down the street in a cloud of summer dust, not the yells of my brothers from the backyard, not the aroma of my mother’s cooking from the kitchen down the hall. Reading was an ocean, a pond, a warm bath, and I slipped underwater. I had gills; I could breathe there, was alive in a book more than anyplace else I ever went.” Anna Quindlen
Guys, I have so many more. So many.
Those are all great quotes. I used to have a word doc in which I collected quotes, but it is long since disappeared into the ether.
“It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.”
― Elizabeth Savage, Last Night at the Ritz
I clicked post before I was done, but meant to say all of Elizabeth Savage’s Last Night at the Ritz is great, but I particularly like these three:
“It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.”
“Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.”
“But you can’t very well lug an encyclopedia around hotels. Fortunately, I did have my flask.”
I am unfamiliar with Elizabeth Savage and clearly I need to orrect that
“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” – Jean Rhys
And “ Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.” ~ Miguel de Unamuno
Just reading through Sean Connery’s obituary this morning, and they featured a quote from him about the power of books in his own life:
“I spent my ‘South Pacific’ tour in every library in Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” Mr. Connery told The Houston Chronicle in 1992. “And on the nights we were dark, I’d see every play I could. But it’s the books, the reading, that can change one’s life. I’m the living evidence.”
Very timely!
These probably aren’t good for CBR, but I do love a ton of Ray Bradbury and Vonnegut quotes.
“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”
― Ray Bradbury
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“Science is magic that works.” —Cats Cradle
Oh man, that reality one is perfect for right now.
oops! not aiming to contradict you; I should have chosen a word other than perfect, haha!
oooh, all three are PERFECT right now
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” Mark Twain
Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. – Tim O’Brien