45 Of The Best Aww-Inspiring Quotes About Books

“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

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” – Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray 

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” – Neil Gaiman in Coraline (print by Aenaon Art Work)

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” – Erasmus

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” – Louisa May Alcott in Work: A Story of Experience (mug from The Scarlett Llama)

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami in Norwegian Wood

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” – Henry Ward Beecher

“I can do things like that when I write–pluck any thread of want and weave a whole world.” – T. Kira Madden in Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King in On Writing (print from InkInTheOzarks)

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.” – Isabel Allende

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” – Salman Rushdie

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“I love books. I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas. I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.” – Nnedi Okorafor in The Book of Phoenix 

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 (print from RedHill Printables)

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.” – Sherman Alexie in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón in The Shadow of the Wind

“I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges (print from wtfoxart)

“I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.” – Tahereh Mafi in Shatter Me

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.” – Benjamin Alire Sáenz in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (bookmark from The Quiet Ones Speak)

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.” – Octavia E. Butler

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” – Umberto Eco

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin in A Dance With Dragons (bookmark from Wonderflies)

“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack” – Virginia Woolf in Street Haunting 

“Books were my pass to personal freedom.” – Oprah Winfrey

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” – Toni Morrison (print from Brighton Gifts)

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen in How Reading Changed My Life

“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 

“Books always make a room better.” – Tanya Boteju in Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens

“You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.” – Patrick Rothfuss in The Name of the Wind 

“I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again — if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.” – Marilynne Robinson

“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” – Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country 

“She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.” – Catherynne M. Valente in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making 

“Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.” – Roxane Gay in Bad Feminist

“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 

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero (pillow from Minnie and Maude)

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.” – Donna Tartt in The Secret History 

“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.” – Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things 

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood in Moral Disorder and Other Stories (print from LittleEra)

“Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” – A.S. Byatt in Possession 

“The artist is no freer than the society in which he lives, and in the United States the writers who stereotype or ignore the Negro and other minorities in the final analysis stereotype and distort their own humanity.” – Ralph Ellison in Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity

“If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.” – Michael Ende in The Neverending Story

What are your favorite quotes about books? Want even more book quotes for your bookish love? Check out these posts: 

30 of the most entertaining and uplifting quotes from Anne of Green Gables

19 of my favorite Fahrenheit 451 quotes

21 Mary Oliver prints you’ll need on your walls

5 creative ways to display your favorite book quotes