Holbrook Jackson Quotes

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you, and to know precisely where each one is located and what was happening in your life at time or where you were when you first read it is the languid and distilled pleasure of the connoisseur.

Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy.

Of all things I liked books best.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

I even love the smell of books.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I wanted to live among books.

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over.

So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.

We live for books.

Books are attracted to me. They make a beeline for me, and stick to me. I have been so fond of them that at last they have begun to reciprocate. In my hands books burst like ripe fruit. Like magic flowers they unfold their petals to show me the vital thought, the suggestive word, the confirming quotation, the decisive illustration.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

We ought to regard books as we do sweetmeats, not wholly to aim at the pleasantest, but chiefly to respect the wholesomest; not forbidding either, but approving the latter most.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

Drink deeply from good books.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.