Quotes about books

A woman whose mood improves with a book, a poem, a song or a cup of coffee is not defeated by anyone; even life loses with her.

Khalil Gibran

Filed under: books, personality, woman

Burning a book made me angry because I knew I was setting fire to a world.

Agustina Bazterrica

The Unworthy

Filed under: books, knowledge, literature

He read and kept his head down. Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.

Tommy Orange

There There

Filed under: books, dream, memory, time

People are always telling me I’m tough. Maybe because I’ve survived so much. The only time I’m tough in my own mind is when I’m seized by a poem and then determined to conquer it and let it live its own peculiar life. All my toughness goes into my writing.

Anne Sexton

A Self Portrait in Letters

Filed under: books, writing

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it- don’t cheat with it.

Ernest Hemingway

Filed under: books, experience, life, writing

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway

Filed under: books, humor, writing

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Virginia Woolf

Filed under: books, knowledge

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Filed under: books, writing

I hoard my books. They are people who do not leave.

Anne Sexton

Self Portrait in Letters

Filed under: books, loneliness, loss

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Filed under: books, experience, literature, past, writing

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

Janet Fitch

White Oleander

Filed under: books, soul, writing

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Ernest Hemingway

Filed under: books, literature, loyalty, wisdom

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Anaïs Nin

Filed under: books, writing

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

Filed under: books, dog, friendship, humor

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

Rick Moody

Filed under: books, writing

The “real me” lives in words, not in what words mean; it lives in what letters and words do and show, not in what they hide.

Anne Sexton

A Self Portrait in Letters

Filed under: books, life, personality, writing

Browse, search, & filter through 33 quotes about books to find words that hit home — whether you’re after something meaningful, a spark of creativity, or just a clever reminder that we’re all figuring it out as we go.

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