Quotes by British Authors - Page 688

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
Agatha Christie
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
Jeanette Winterson
What better place to kill time than a library?
Diane Setterfield
People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn'
Lemmy Kilmister
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!
Charles Ogden
Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
Jasper Fforde
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Jasper Fforde
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod
Salman Rushdie
We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
Cory Doctorow
It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.
Tracy Chevalier
We owe it to each other to tell stories.
Neil Gaiman
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
C.S. Lewis
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
E.M. Forster
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
Margery Williams Bianco
No furniture is so charming as books.
Sydney Smith
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W Somerset Maugham
. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.
Neil Gaiman
I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
C.S. Lewis
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.
Diane Setterfield
And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?
Lewis Carroll
Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.
Neil Gaiman
When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte
Philip Pullman
Where should I go?" -Alice. "That depends on where you want to end up." - The Cheshire Cat.
Lewis Carroll
[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.
Simon Van Booy
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
Nick Hornby
Of course I loved books more than people.
Diane Setterfield
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.
Anne Brontë
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
Diane Setterfield
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
Diane Setterfield
If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.
Winston S. Churchill
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
Neil Gaiman
What are you doing with all those books anyway?" Ron asked. Just trying to decide which ones to take with us," said Hermione. When we're looking for the Horcruxes."Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.
J.K. Rowling
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
Roald Dahl
It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
Jane Austen
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
John Keats
I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.
Roald Dahl
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
Roald Dahl
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
China Miéville
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Gissing
Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.
Jasper Fforde
Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.
Neil Gaiman
Books were safer than other people anyway.
Neil Gaiman
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
Neil Gaiman
If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.
J.K. Rowling
Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
David Mitchell
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter
If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.
Daphne du Maurier
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Diane Setterfield
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
Diane Setterfield
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!
Wilkie Collins
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C.S. Lewis
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
Jeanette Winterson
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
G.K. Chesterton
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
Stephen Fry
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
Neil Gaiman