For me the greatest joy is to be able to submerge myself for a few hours every day in a human time that otherwise would be alien to me. A lifetime is not enough.

[...] to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself [...]

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

If you drop a book into the toilet, you can fish it out, dry it off and read that book. But if you drop your Kindle in the toilet, you’re pretty well done.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.

...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, ... I was there on the page

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.