Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid.

Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.

I love reading. I spend a huge amount of time travelling on planes and have always got a book on the go.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.

Books were my passion and my escape from madness.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

When I was a kid, all I liked were books and chocolate.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

One can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a good book.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!

Books are a time machine.

I have always loved reading. Ever since I was a young girl I had a book by my bed and would get lost in the world of make believe.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

The big advantage of a book is that it's very easy to rewind. Close it and you're right back at the beginning.

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

Home is where your books are.

I was never without a book in my hand.