All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed....No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over. ~ Eugene Field, Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) 

He would pick a flower for her, lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them? She dragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the place. ~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve. ~ Charles De Secondat

I cannot think of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed, without warning or discomfort, on the last page of a new book that we most wanted to read. ~ Lord John Russell

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

No book is really worth reading at that age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. ~ C. S. Lewis

Literature is my Utopia. ~ Helen Keller

Life can't really ever defeat a writer who is in love with writing, 
for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, 
cold, treacherous, constant. ~ Edna Ferber (1885-1968)

After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sports of all. ~ A. S. W. Rosenbach

Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me. ~ Gloria Naylor

"What is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations." ~ Lewis Carroll 

That lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book Lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines-not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. ~ Robertson Davies

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

First you have the writer who can write but can't spell. Then you have the editor who can spell but can't write. Finally you have the publisher who can neither spell nor write, and he makes all the money. ~ Anonymous, in Literary Agents by Michael Larsen (1996)

Editor: A person....whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and see that the chaff is printed. ~ Elbert Hubbard

A real book is not one that's read, but one that reads us. ~ W. H. Auden

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. ~ Anna Quindlen

In reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Read in order to live. ~ Gustave Flaubert

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds...In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. ~ William Ellery Channing

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority. ~ Charles Caleb Cotton

I cannot live without books. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn't play with fire but those who make our fingers burn. ~ Stephen Vizinczey

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. ~ Thomas Carlyle

If I had to choose between a wall of paintings and a wall of books, I would certainly choose books. When you walk into a room of books, you're embraced by them. ~ Timothy Mauson

There are a lot of people like me, people who need books the way they need air. ~ Richard Marek

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury

No girl was ever ruined by a book. ~ James J. Walker

Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with. ~ John Mortimer

Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are. ~ Anonymous Proverb

There are some people...who are constantly drunk on books. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of works in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. ~ H. L. Mencken

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. ~ Charles Scribner

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough? ~ Julian Barnes

I do not read a book: I hold a conversation with the author. ~ Elbert Hubbard

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves. ~ Arnold Bennett

Without disparaging the other forms of collecting, I confess a conviction that the human impulse to collect reaches one of its highest levels in the domain of books. ~ Theodore C. Blegen

I've been in love three hundred times in my life, and all but five were with books. ~ Lee Glickstein

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today. ~ Holbrock Jackson

Books are a narcotic. ~ Franz Kafka

With a binding like you've got, people are going to want to know what's in the book. ~ Alan Jay Lerner, An American in Paris (screenplay)

Everything in the world exists in order that it may end up in a book. ~ Randall Short

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. ~ Sydney Smith

If the books which you read are your own, mark with a pen or pencil the most considerable things in them which you desire to remember. Then you may read that book the second time over with half the trouble, by your eye running over the paragraphs which your pencil has noted. It is but a very weak objection against this practice to say, "I shall spoil my book"; for I persuade myself that you did not buy it as a bookseller, to sell again for gain, but as a scholar, to improve your mind by it; and if the mind be improved, your advantage is abundant, through your book yields less money to your executors. ~ Isaac Watts, Logic On the Right use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1724) 

Books do actually consume air and exhale perfumes. ~ Eugene Field, Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) 

Is there any excitement to compare with the opening of a fresh parcel of books? ~ William Targ

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. ~ Charles Lamb 

A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Cicero

It seemed to me as if I had written the book myself in some former life, so sincerely it spoke my thought and experience. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wish to have one copy of every book in the world. ~ Sir Thomas Phillipps

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books. ~ John Ruskin

What is reading but silent conversation? ~ Walter Savage Landor

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore! ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave. ~ Hanns Bohatta

Books are a friend which never imposes, but is always with you only slightly less intimately
than God. ~ Brockeim

When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. ~ Desiderus Erasmus

I have no mistress but my books. ~ S.J. Adair Fitzgerald

I know not how to abstain from reading. ~ Samuel Pepys