quotations about books
It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn’t otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn’t change. It doesn’t change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Paris Review, winter 1997
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,", Other Inquisitions
All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.
TIM LEBBON
Dawn
I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, Books: Their History
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. AUDEN
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes