Gustave Flaubert Quotes

I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it.

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.

Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.

Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.

Of all things I liked books best.

In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

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.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

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.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

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.

Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?

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

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

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

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

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

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.