Even though I’m a book blogger and an author, I am frequently stumped for words that express how much I love books. That’s why I’m so grateful that many of the wisest and wittiest thinkers across time have managed to put what we love about books into words. This past summer, I finally decided to compile my bookish quote collection in one volume, which I published in July. Over the course of writing my book A Reader’s Library of Book Quotes, I gathered over 400 quotes about the importance of books and reading. (Read more about my bestselling bookish quote collection here.)
In this epic list of 90 bookish quotes, you’ll find a sampling of all the insightful, funny quotes about books I collected while curating my book quote anthology. This essential collection of 90 bookish quotes captures the life of a book worm and has many uses. For instance, if you’re looking for book quotes for Instagram captions (or Instagram captions for book pictures), ideas for inscriptions on gift books, and bookish quote decoration ideas, you’ve come to the right place. For thousands of years, books have inspired passion in readers. Now read some of the best of the best bookish quotes spanning time and space.
| “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” — Louisa May Alcott in Work: A Story of Experience |
| “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” — Erasmus |
| “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” — C.S. Lewis |
| “I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” — Umberto Eco |
| “A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.” — Robert Aris Willmott |
| “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” — Annie Dillard in The Living |
| “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” — Harper Lee |
| “Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” — Lena Dunham |
| “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” — Logan Pearsall Smith |
| “A good book is an event in my life.” — Stendhal |
| “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Cicero |
| “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” — Henry Ward Beecher |
| “A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” — Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards |
| “I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.” — Tahereh Mafi |
| “His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.” — Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 1 |
| “Life happened because I turned the pages.” — Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading |
| “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” — Henry Ward Beecher |
| “Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness?” — Sarah MacLean in The Rogue Not Taken |
| “I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading contest. I hit a bookmark.” — Stephen Wright |
| “My wife joined a book club. They primarily read wine labels.” — Unknown |
| “When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[…].” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed |
| “Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.” — Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book |
| “Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” — Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate |
| “The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.” — Ross McDonald |
| “There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.” — Betty MacDonald, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic |
| “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” — John Green in The Fault in Our Stars |
| “Books may well be the only true magic.” — Alice Hoffman |
| “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin |
| “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” — Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel |
| “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somersat Maugham, Books and You |
| “I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that’s way more interesting that yours will ever be.” — Elizabeth Scott, Bloom |
| “I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.” — Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song |
| “You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.” — Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary |
| “I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
| “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” — Mason Cooley |
| “Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.” — Seanan McGuire, Indexing |
| “I’ve discovered as I’ve grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when you’re a kid. It isn’t just a straightforward fairy tale.” — Rachel McAdams |
| “He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.” — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables |
| “There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge |
| “Reading brings us unknown friends” — Honoré de Balzac |
| “Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.” — E. Lockhart, We Were Liars |
| “I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.” — Carlos Ruiz Safón, The Shadow of the Wind |
| “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx |
| “A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.” — Walter Mosley, The Long Fall |
| “There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.” — E. Nesbit, The Magic World |
| “‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” — Mark Twain |
| “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” — P.J. O’Rourke |
| “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde |
| “So many books, so little time.” — Frank Zappa |
| “I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at people.” — Charles Bukowski |
| “There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” — Bertrand Russell |
| “Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.” — Thea Dorn |
| “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey |
| “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 |
| “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami |
| “Books are more than words, they’re dreams, ideas, and answers, and that is why they fear them” — Brandt Legg, The Last Librarian |
| “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” — Ray Bradbury |
| “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” — Benjamin Franklin |
| “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.” — Jacques Derrida |
| “Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” — Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler |
| “A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.” — Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book |
| “A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.” — Thomas Kempis |
| “All good books are about everything, abbreviated.” — Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle |
| “I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.” — Voltaire |
| “It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History |
| “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” — A.S. Byatt, Possession |
| “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn |
| “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz |
| “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” — Orhan Pamuk |
| “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.” — Germaine Greer |
| “My library is an archive of longings.” — Susan Sontag |
| “A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.” — Shelby Foote |
| “That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” — Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance, Or, the Alderman’s Bargain |
| “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man” — T.S. Eliot |
| “Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.” — Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling |
| “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…” — Dwight D. Eisenhower |
Want even more quotes? Check out my bestselling, ultimate collection of 400+ bookish quotes, A Reader’s Library of Book Quotes.
