Used Books Quotes

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.

I don't like it when I see my books sold cheaply.

Any given day, you'll find me at secondhand bookstores.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

With any luck, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good cafe in one corner, serving dark beer and kielbasa to keep up one's strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria's Secret catalogs.

My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.

Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise.

Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.

When I was a kid in year one and year two, I had troubles with reading and writing, and my mum took me to St. Vinnies and we bought this big box of second-hand books, and she worked with me to turn that weakness around, you know.

I have this obsession with really cool, old books.

Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses.

Used books are the sluts of the literary world. Passed around from person to person, spreading their pages for anyone, getting cheaper and cheaper until eventually they end up in prison.

I love to both give and receive very old books.

I plan to live to be 98, so I'll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

I came across 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller in one of the most romantic ways one can find a story. I was digging through a pile of used books at my local library when my hand gravitated toward its brilliant teal and glistening gold cover.

My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.

I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.

I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.