It’s the season of joy and divine carnage!
Our favorite volhv has packed his staff, crated his nechists and traded Atlanta for the land of romance, fromage and perfect covers. He will reach French readers via Édition Bookmark, in e-book format on January 21st and in paperback on February 23rd 2026.
As usual, the French publishers have delivered the most Cherno-chic aesthetic possible. I see, I crave, I Nav.
From the volhv I love to the books I love. I recently came across a quote by Edith Wharton (of The Age of Innocence fame) describing the moment she receives a love letter:
The first glance to see how many pages there are, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering over each phrase and each word, the taking possession, the absorbing of them one by one, and finally the choosing of the one that will be carried in one’s thoughts all day, making an exquisite accompaniment to the dull prose of life
It struck me so much in its familiarity and I realized this is exactly how I treat every new story from a beloved author. From greedily counting the pages to devouring and then keeping them with me, hopefully for a lifetime.
So now I’m curious, Horde:
Do you have favorite quotes about books, reading, or storytelling? Ones that make you nod, sigh, or want to frame them over your reading nook?
Please paste or paraphrase them in the comments, I can’t wait to see!
“When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536. On a trip to Asheville, NC years ago, I found a set of cards with this quote in beautiful calligraphy. I absolutely love this quote!
Such a wonderful and challenging question! With so many quotes that have served as touchstones in my life it is difficult to decide but one keeps jumping up and down saying “pick me”.
From Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Cross-time Saloon series “Anger is always fear in drag.”
“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.”
Albus Dumbledore
JK Rowling
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” —Groucho Marx
So, I have three. Two are from two of my favorite books. The third is from books one and two of a series that I just started. The first is from A Ring of Endless Light by the great Madeline L’Engle – “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.” My second, and honestly, I’m not sucking up, is from The Princess Bride. This book and movie has given the world so many great lines, but the one that makes me melt is “As you wish.” Last is from A Court of Thorns and Roses which took on such a deeper, wonderful meaning when I read A Wind of Mist and Fury. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you.” After reading AWOMAF, I teared up when I realized what Rhysand was truly saying.
As a follow up…
“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury
I know it’s probably cliché, but the quote from George R R,
“I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I have walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”
Now, I’m not a huge fan of his books (no shade to those who may love them! They just werent my thing), but this quote of his always stuck with me. I’ve read to escape the world since I was really young, first because the kinda cult I grew up in wasn’t the best environment for kids, and then later I became disabled and physically just can’t do as much as I’d like. So books have always been the thing I turn to in order to visit other places, greet old and new friends, and learn new ways to see the world.
The French editions are so gorgeous.
“No apologies for surviving” from author Hailey Edwards
“He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”
— Erin Morgenstern, “The Starless Sea”
A Charlie Brown Cartoon where Linus says “LOOK! A Library card! I’ve taken out a Library Card! I have been given my citizenship in the Land of Knowledge! Books have made my life so much better.
I know it’s a poem by Dylan Thomas, not a book quote but for some reason it keeps popping up in my mind.
“ Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.”
It’s very nice when read by Anthony Hopkins. Not sure but I think it was quoted in the Interstellar film a few years ago.
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.
I see someone else posted this, too. P.S. It’s not by Groucho Marx.
It sounds like James Thurber but I can’t remember for sure. It’s one of my faves as well.
This quote by John Irving from A Prayer for Owen Meany about loss states, “When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose them all at once. You lose them in pieces over time. You gradually accumulate the parts of them that are gone”.
My favorite quotes are from Strange the Dreamer- I felt exactly what the author was saying.
“He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all.”
“Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.”
Oh my gosh! As a librarian it’s literally torture to only choose one, but I love the following by Annie Dillard “ She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
My favorite quote about books is from John Waters, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f*** ’em! “
Favorite quotes:
“…the stony expression of a man who was either about to charge the enemy line for the fifth time in a single day, or do his taxes.” (Sweep of the Blade)
And
“Did these people realize how rich they were? All the air they could breathe.” (Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold)
*Glances down at “Congratulations, you’re evil enough!” tshirt*
Use your words.
Here Kitty Kitty!
It took me awhile to remember the book it was from but I always remembered the quote because I felt so seen.
“True readers are rapacious that way; it doesn’t matter if we’re holding Jane Eyre or the folded up instructions to a bottle of Tylenol, we just need the alphabetic fix.” -Denise Hamilton “The Jasmine Trade”
I’m traveling in France right now and for a second I thought my email had been geo localized! 😂
Hehehehe 😂
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” -attributed to Cicero
-AND this doesn’t quite fit the quote part of the assignment, but a few lines from the movie Out of Africa (not sure if it’s in the Isak Denisen (Karen Blixen) memoir or not):
Karen: He has got lovely books. Does he lend them?
Berkeley: We had a friend… Hopworth, he’d got a book from Denys and didn’t return it. Denys was furious. I said to Denys… “You wouldn’t lose a friend for the sake of a book.” He said, “No, but he has, hasn’t he?”
I cannot live without books… Thomas Jefferson
there’s more, but that’s the part I remember….
I have a tattoo of ‘I am no bird and no net ensnares me’ from Jane Eyre. I have some artwork with that quote as well. I plan to get a tattoo of ‘Love as though wilt’ from Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
(Neil Gaiman)
” Here, Kitty,kitty…”
I have a tough time remembering quotes but my husband brought up this one recently
There is only one god, and His name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: ‘not today’.” Famous words from Syrio Forel in “A Golden Crown.”
I cannot live without books.
Thomas Jefferson
I can’t beat that…
I will never cease to be amazed by books
Seriously, just think about it:
Thousands of people read the same book, but in each one’s mind, the characters look different and the setting changes and we’re all reading the same thing but it’s so unique to each of us. That is insanely cool.
As a great lover of Jane Austen, this quote has stuck with me ever since this first time I read Pride and Prejudice:
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”
― Elizabeth Bennett, Pride and Prejudice
“I was just wondering whose silver tongue or golden pen is telling the tale we find ourselves in” Once Upon a Winter’s Night by Dennis McKiernan.
As any Pratchett lover can confirm, the absolute tastiest morsels are always to be found in the footnotes. And among the countless snippets of wisdom disguised as wit, this one from Guards! Guards! is possibly (and only possibly) my absolute favorite.
“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
No one else has ever come close to describing the way a good bookshop or library makes me feel.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where he answers WHY-just my favorite bits-
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. . . Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her to the flies.
So now do you know why books are hated and feared? They show people the pore in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, came from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”
Two quotes finally came to mind, but I kept drawing a blank at first:
“We live as we dream–alone ” (Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”)
“Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and frets
his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury–signifying nothing.”
(Shakespeare, “Macbeth”)
Wow, those are depressing.
Some quotes:
“A house without books is like a room without windows.” – Horace Mann
“Books invite all; they constrain none.” – Inscribed on the Los Angeles Public Library Goodhue Building – Hartley Burr Alexander
Gordon Lightfoot – If you could read my mind (song lyric)
You won’t read that book again, because the ending’s just too hard to take.
Seriously considering having it added to tattoo.
I keep a journal of my favorite quotes and read a page or two a day. One of my favorites is from My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel.
“…luck has a cause, like anything else and I believe that there exists a mental attitude capable of shaping circumstances more or less according to one’s own wishes.”
I think it’s a proverb rather than a quote:
“A book is like a garden you carry in your pocket.”
I also really love gardens. When you combine the two on a lovely day…it’s like actual MAGIC.
I love this translation of Baudelaire’s Les Chats:
Cats
Fevered lovers and austere thinkers
Love equally, in their ripe season
Cats powerful and gentle, pride of the house
Like them they feel the cold, like them are sedentary
Friends of science and sensuality
They seek the silence and the horror of the shadows
Erebus had taken them for its funeral coursers
Could they to servitude incline their pride.
Dreaming, they take on noble postures
Great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of emptiness
Seeming to fall asleep into an endless dream.
Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks
And nuggets of gold like fine sand
Vaguely bestar their mystic pupils.
I have entire journals of quotes covering 30 years of voracious reading. Every so often I pull them out to see what still resounds.
“Your reward for doing something good,
is to do something else good.” – Terry Pratchett
Hi fellow BDH’ers. I don’t usually post, as I am a very private person. I read this about memorable quotes and it struck something in me. I remember a shopping trip to Costco many years ago while perusing my favorite part of the store, movies, books, and audio books. I happened to overhear a couple discussing the movie Sleepless in Seattle. One of my favorite movies. She was expounding on the movie and he was disparaging it, obviously not enamored of it. I caught the eye of the woman and said it’s a chick flick, and we both laughed.
“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul!
Emily Dickinson
One of my favorites on books. I read her for comfort when dealing with loss –
“The sweeping up the heart and putting love away, we will not need again until eternity.”
“Marshall my mental parliament” from The Fencer trilogy by K J Parker
I try to always quote Jurassic Park. not in the book but the film: Dr. ian Malcolm: “you read what they did and you took the next step” or something like that
“What’s loved, lives.”
“…the true dark angel, the unfallen Destroyer, the Pale Slayer who never really dies…”
both from Deep Wizardy by Diane Duane at the end.
“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” – Emily Brontë
Forever my favourite.
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. Groucho Marx
from Suzanne Wright: comment from Lucifer having OCD:
What brothers me is that health professionals give fancy names to conditions or learning difficulties that will irritate the patients; like
OCD is not in alphabetical order
putting an’S’ in lisp
and making dyslexia a word that no one can spell.
It’s just mean
I smile every time I read it; it is so true!
From Carl Sagan: What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
a book a read when I was a child had a phrase that has stuck with me all my life. I think of this phrase everytime I try something new, from joining the Army to walking down the isle at my wedding and the 1st day of every new job; “facing the sheer terror of doing exactly what you want and taking the leap into the void”
I am re-reading the English version whilst Ulveham by Gåte plays in the background. Chills.
I kept reading a book I couldn’t get into, but the world building was good. I didn’t complete the series but got this line
“From world to world he rides, from the gates of story to the shores of dream, until the world is changed and the horse is freed.”
Change is inevitable, they say. Struggle is optional.
Your life’s path deviates from what you intend.
Whether you like it or not.
Whether you fight it or not.
Whether your heart breaks or not.
Bailey Cates
Brownies and Broomsticks: A Magical Bakery Mystery
#kindlequotes
This quote is about learning, but since learning is so often done through reading for me, it definitely counts.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King