Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside book — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door."
"When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was."
"It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share, .. I will continue featuring books on the 'Oprah Winfrey Show' when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation."
"When I didn't have friends, I had books."
"In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent!"
"Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love."
"I'm a relatively disciplined writer who composes the whole book before beginning to execute and write it. Of course, you can't hold - you cannot imagine a whole novel before you write it; there are limits to human memory and imagination. Lots of things come to your mind as you write a book, but again, I make a plan, chapter, know the plot."
"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."
"To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?"
"Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wildes books in a bookshop makes me smile."
"I think most albums deserve a documentary because [an album] is a visual book. You don't have to read up on it because you can listen and watch the whole story. I would love to see lots of albums [become films.]"
"If you read, your book is kind of your friend, because it's like the book is telling you its story and you're being the listener."
"We realize the importance of light when we see darkness. We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced. In the same way when we were in Swat, we realized the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns."
"The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking."
"The best way to fight terrorism is not through guns. It's through pens, books, teachers and schools."
"read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism."
"I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms."
"I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level."
"My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old."
"If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine."
