Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

I've always loved books.

I wanted to live among books.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

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

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.

In fact, isn't it a joy - there is hardly a greater one - to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?

I even love the smell of books.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

I must have books everywhere. They're the soul of a room-they reveal the taste, the interests, and the secrets of whoever lives there.

When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you, and to know precisely where each one is located and what was happening in your life at time or where you were when you first read it is the languid and distilled pleasure of the connoisseur.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

The printed page was like wine to me.

All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.

Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.