Geoffrey Chaucer Quotes

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

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.

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

But it doesn't stop at school. We can all enjoy books throughout our lives - as I certainly continue to do.

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent or praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe.

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.

We profit little by books we do not enjoy.

I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. It's perfectly okay to take a book, read it, have a good time, giggle and laugh - and turn off the TV. I love that.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

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

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

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.

I even love the smell of books.

Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.

I sometimes get tired because I can seldom read a book for pleasure. I'm like the play reviewer who happens to go to a play on an off day and can't help but view it critically.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile." "A what?" asked Eragon. "One who loves books," explained Jeod.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books