Marianne Wiggins Quotes

Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.

Whenever I'm reading a book I enjoy, I always develop a mental list of the people I want to share it with.

I hate that bookstores are closing. Hate it! What's better than hanging out a bookstore, be it independent or chain, and talking books with people who love books?

Always, always, always pass a good book along on to somebody else.

It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.

I read a lot for me. But I'm not one of those people who gets 'The New York Times' book review and runs out and buys 10 books and is done with them and passing them out to friends, you know, two weeks later.

It's nice being married to someone who likes to read because you can indulge in geeky conversations about books.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.

If you want to make friends, go out of your way to do things for other people--things that require time, energy, unselfishness, and thoughtfulness.

A man with few friends is only half-developed; there are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open him.

No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house--on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she'd use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

In a letter to a friend the thought is often unimportant, and the feeling, if it be only a desire to entertain him, every thing.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

Teachers and librarians are some of my favorite people, especially since I was a teacher myself. I love talking to them because they have wonderful ideas about how to share books, and especially about how to share my books with kids.

It started when she passed me a note in English class. The note said you don't seem as awful as I hear you are. I passed one back that read: beware I am as awful as people say and worse. She laughed and I had a friend. She didn't become my Ally and I didn't ask her to or want her to but she became my friend and that was more than anyone else was willing to do.

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!

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

Sydney had been horrified to discover my home library consisted of a bartending dictionary and an old copy of Esquire, and at her pleading, I'd promised to read something more substantial. I was trying to think deep thoughts as I read Gatsby, but mostly I wanted to throw some parties.