For those who love to read, there is no better feeling than being curled up with a book on a rainy afternoon or sifting through your local library on a Sunday morning, enveloped in the smell of old hardcovers and newly printed paperbacks. For others, it’s the unique joy of getting a new library card, or finally getting your hands on the next book in a series near and dear to your heart.
These quotes for book lovers capture all of those feelings and more. Whether you speed read through every work on Oprah Winfrey’s book list, or can’t remember the last time you read something at all, everyone can remember the moment they fell in love with a mind blowing book, powerful chapter, or quote—maybe even one of the quotes listed here.
With that in mind, here are some of the best quotes from fellow book lovers!
1. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” ―Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
2. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” - Alan Bennett
3. “‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,’ said Jojen. ‘The man who never reads lives only one.’” ―George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
4. “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”—Rene Descartes
5. “I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”—Montesquieu
6. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”—Ernest Hemingway
7. “But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”—Jane Austen
8. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
9. “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” - Mortimer J. Adler
10. "Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge." - Patrick Ness
11. “Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting for one at the end of a long day makes the day happier.” – Kathleen Norris
12. “Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham
13. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan
14. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen
15. “I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.” – J.K. Rowling
16. “Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” - Vera Nazarian
17. “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” - Walter Cronkite
18. “Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.” - John Green
19. “Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
20. “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
21. “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.” - Mark Haddon
22. “You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” - Paul Sweeney
23. “The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.” - W. Somerset Maugham
24. “I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.” - William Lyon Phelps
25. “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”– Abraham Lincoln
26. “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” - Margaret Atwood
27. “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” –Mason Cooley
28. "I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card." - Laura Bush
29. “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” - Groucho Marx
30. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen
31. “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’” – Helen Exley
32. “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” - Louis L’Amour
33. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” - Henry David Thoreau
34. “It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book…from the reading of ‘good books’ there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.” ― Gordon B. Hinckley
35. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” – Henry Ward Beecher
36. “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once”. – C.S. Lewis
37. “Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.” - James Gleick
38. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
39. “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
40. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading” - William Styron
41. “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. - Charles W. Eliot
42. “Books were my pass to personal freedom.” - Oprah Winfrey
43. “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”—Abraham Lincoln
44. “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” - Annie Proulx
45. “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” - Mary Wortley Montagu
46. "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of Library." - Jorge Luis Borges
47. “A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” - Abraham Lincoln
48. “Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.” ―Adelise M. Cullens
49. “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
50. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” ―Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Featured photo: Sincerely Media / Unsplash
