So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
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.
Only bad books have good endings. If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end.
It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
Literature is news that stays news.
The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.
Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go….
