Anthony Powell Quotes

Home is where your books are.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.

I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed!

Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.

As long as I'm reading, I'm at home.

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

I adore all Agatha Christie's books and turn to them whenever I'm ill or need cheering up.

I take refuge in my books.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

Public libraries were a huge source of comfort and joy for me when I was growing up. I still spend time there.

I absolutely love reading.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -- low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.

I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.

I really, really wanted to lose awareness of the here and now. The best way for me to do that was bury myself in a book.

The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.

I honestly believe there is absolutely nothing like going to bed with a good #book; or a friend who's #read one.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.