The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
Never judge a book by its movie.
Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)
Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.
If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.
