Book Quotes

Being poor is only romantic in books.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

There is no book so bad, but something good may be found in it.[translation by John Willis Clark]There is no book so bad but it has something good in it.[translation by John Ormsby][No hay libro tan malo, que no tenga algo bueno.]

The best books are those that tell you what you know already.

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

With The Thousand and One Nights, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.[Con Las mil y una noches, aprendí para no olvidarlo nunca que sólo deberían leerse los libros que nos fuerzan a releerlos.]

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash.