120 Magical Bookish Quotes: Ignite Your Bibliophile

Did someone order the Bookish Quotes latte with a pump of new book scent and a shot of coziness? Order up!

As bookworms, of course, we love to read. And when our eyes dance off the pages of our current book, while avoiding eye contact with our never-ending TBR pile, it’s nice to get comfy in our favorite baggy sweater and look at some wholesome bookish quotes. Because, naturally, when we’re not physically reading, we like to read about the feeling of reading. We’re simple creatures, really. Just give us the books, leave the coffee within arms reach, and we’ll be dandy for hours.

Something that sets our list apart from others is that our epic list of bookish quotes comes straight from the books themselves! The majority of our bookish quotes are credited with the author and book title, so you know what that means. More books to explore along with your wonderous dose of bookish quotes!

While it’s fun to read bookish quotes just for kicks, there are a few ways you can utilize the fun words within the bookish quotes for even more bibliophile fun.

• International Book Giving Day: Scooch over Valentine’s Day, February 14th is also International Book Giving Day! Whether you’re gifting a book to your significant other or a fellow book lover, or you’re treating yourself to a new-to-you book (as you should!), wrapping up the book and attaching a tag with bookish quotes written on it can elevate the experience! Think about the cuteness, the aesthetic; your book buddy will love it!
• DIY Bookmarks: Create your very own bookmark with a quote you’ve selected yourself that resonates with you and your reading time. You could even make homemade bookmarks as a gift for your fellow bookworm friends, place them in random library books for someone else to find, and put them in Little Free Libraries!
• Library Selfie Day: There’s a holiday for that? You bet there is! Every year on January 25th is library selfie day; what a time to be alive. Celebrate the holiday by taking a trip to your local library, having a quaint little reading time, and taking a selfie! You can use one of our handpicked bookish quotes as your social media caption to really show off your bookish festive flare.
• Bookish Quotes Vision Board: Perhaps you’ve heard of vision boards before, but how about a bookish quotes vision board? If you aspire to read more or get more out of your relationship with reading, surrounding yourself with positive, inspiring, and uplifting bookish quotes can do much more than you think. Our brains thrive off of receiving positive messages; why not start here!

Short Bookish Quotes

Quick and sweet, these short bookish quotes will leave you wanting more! These short bookish quotes can also be the perfect fit for an adorable and super easy DIY bookmark!

We’ve picked out some really good ones here; by the time you’re done, you’ll want to install a sliding ladder in your home and build your own library! A library built on the foundation of giddiness spawned from bookish quotes; what could be better?!

• “The presence of so many books makes it easier to breathe” – Mackenzi Lee, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
• “Birds have wings. Humans have books.” – Unknown
• “Let them volley and thunder. I’ll speak of bookish things.” – Salman Rushdie
• “Reading books is dreaming with open eyes.” – V.V
• “You bookish people love teasers, don’t you?” – Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
• “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” – Virginia Woolf
• “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” – Ernest Hemingway
• “The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.” – Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
• “She found heaven in a bookstore, she got lost in the pages.” – Unknown
• “As long as there were unread books in the world, she would be fine.” – Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
• “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” – Louisa May Alcott
• “But one can’t be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.” – Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
• “Happiness is having your own library card.” – Sally Brown, Peanuts
• “The world belongs to those who read.” – Rick Holland
• “I love how books are not really just books at all, but doorways.” – Ashley Poston, Bookish and the Beast
• “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood
• “You are full of bookish joy, but still woefully short on shelf space.” – Anne Bogel, I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life
• “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” – Fernando Pessoa
• “Fiction is the best kind of reality.” – Isabel Bandeira, Bookishly Ever After
• “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx
• “A book can change someone’s world.” – Alechia Dow, The Sound of Stars
• “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
• “I’ll have enough books when they fill my room like the stars fill the sky.” – E.V. Fairfall
• “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
• “I have given up on reality and am now simply searching for a good fantasy.” – John Jay Simmons
• “A well read woman is a dangerous creature.” – Lisa Kleypas
• “Too shy, too bookish, too impulsive” – Audrey Coulthurst, Of Fire and Stars
• “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” – Oscar Wilde
• “Reading won’t solve your problems, but again neither will house-work.” – BookishElf
• “I do so hate finishing books. I would like to go on with them for years…” – Beatrix Potter
• “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bookworm is in need of a bookish community.” – Adrika Mondal
• “We read to know we’re not alone.” – William Nicholson, Shadowlands
• “I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.” – Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
• “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• “It was always the bookish ones you had to be worried about. They knew sh*t.” – Linsey Hall, Magic Revealed
• “Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.” – John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
• “I would like to be made into a book, if I were a tree.” – Millie Florence, Lydia Green Of Mulberry Glen
• “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” – Charles W. Eliot
• “All witches who’d lived in her cottage were bookish types.” – Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
• “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” – William Styron, Conversations with William Styron
• “You bookish little pervert.” – Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
• “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde
• “I love big books and small books.” – Ashley Poston, Bookish and the Beast
• “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” -Groucho Marx
• “Too bad real boyfriends aren’t as awesome as book boyfriends.” – Isabel Bandeira, Bookishly Ever After
• “When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” – Vincent Starrett
• “I want to read all those hundreds of books.” – Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
• “Always look on the bright side of life. Otherwise, it’ll be too dark to read.” – Unknown
• “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• “She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard

Bookish Sayings

What’s better than bookish quotes? Bookish sayings! We’re just joking, of course, they’re tied.

These bookish sayings can make for a good smile or giggle, a silly thing to message your book buddy, a new crest for the book club, or even fantastic letter board quotes!

• “Forget Facebook; where’s your Good Reads page?”
• “Book nerd? Pardon, it’s pronounced ‘Literary Badass‘”
• “There is only one thing that could replace a book … the next book”
• “Just one more chapter … unless it’s a cliffhanger, then just one more”
• “Why would I want to be “normal” when I can briefly adopt the personality of the characters in my book”
• “Bookish Shmookish”
• “I love big books and I cannot lie”
• “Can’t talk, book hangover”
• “Fiercely Bookish”
• “I tried to form a gang once but it turned into a bookish discord”
• “Author say whaaaaat?”
• “In the process of building a library, no time to chat”
• “It’s a bookish thing, you wouldn’t understand”
• “The only place I’m getting carded is the library”
• “Do I really have too many books, or do I just need some more bookshelves? The mysteries of the bookish universe are complex”
• “The author hurt my feelings again”
• “I’m just a sleepy little bookworm who needs a snack and one more chapter”
• “Barnes & Noble shopping spree > literally anything else I could be offered”
• “Yea, parties are cool, but have you ever finished a book in one sitting?”
• “I need more hours in the day. For what, you ask? Books. The answer is always books.”
• “My TBR is so neglected it’s probably started a support group by now”
• “You can never have too many bookmarks”

Quotes About Authors

If you can find an author who doesn’t love reading … well … the only case that would be nerdily possible is that they’re reading their own 1st draft. All jokes aside, along with bookish quotes, quotes about authors are a lovely side avenue of words to read that may even inspire you to pick up the writer pen yourself!

• “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin
• “An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.” – Joseph Conrad
• “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• “Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment.” – M.R. James
• “We are writers, my love. We don’t cry. We bleed on paper.” – a.y.
• “To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They’re also theirs.” – Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
• “A writer is a world, trapped in a person.” – Victor Hugo
• “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
• “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
• “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
• “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
• “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King
• “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter
• “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
• “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” – Neil Gaiman

Famous Quotes About Books and Reading

When we don’t have our nose in a book, we like to have our eyes on famous quotes about books and reading. Right? We’re not the only ones? Of course not; that’s why you’re here!

These famous quotes about books and reading span from classic authors to new age word smiths and lovers of literature. Be warned now, you may have a little reading bug bite you while you’re taking a look at these bookish quotes. And the most common side effect, as we’re told, is a massive reading session.

• “It’s remarkable how being around books, even those you’ve never read, can have a calming effect, like walking into a crowded party and finding it full of people you know.” – Mackenzi Lee, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
• “They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.” – Lemony Snicket
• “Give me a book. There is no present I care about but that.” – Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther
• “Books don’t change people; paragraphs do, sometimes even sentences.” – John Piper
• “But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.” – David Nicholls, One Day
• “You are a reader, and therefore a thinker, an observer, a living soul who wants more out of this human experience.” – Salil Jha
• “I have lots of favorite books because I have lots of moods and I have a favorite book for every mood.” – Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
• “You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” – Paul Sweeney
• “Each spine had been an open door away whispering, Come in, come in. Here is the land you’ve never seen before. Here is a place to hide when you’re frightened, to play when you’re bored, to rest when the world seems unkind.” – Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars
• “The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That’s why we go to the movies and say, “Oh, the book is better.” – Paulo Coelho
• “I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.” – Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
• “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass
• “Books are not really just books at all, but doorways. They are portals into places I’ve never been and people I’ll never be.” – Ashley Poston, Bookish and the Beast
• “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein
• “Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.” – Plato
• “He is clearly bookish. I did not follow a single word of their conversation at dinner last night, not one jot of it. He must be bookish.” – Gail Carriger, Soulless
• “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
• “One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.” – Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
• “It also meant she thought of books as medication and sanctuary and the source of all good things. Nothing yet had proven her wrong.” – Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
• “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• “She decided at once that she and the boy were cut of the same bookish cloth, and could quite possibly become co-conspirators.” – Jordan Stratford, Wollstonecraft
• “In the way of bookish children, she carried her books into trees and along the banks of chuckling creeks, weaving her way along their slippery shores with the sort of grace that belongs only to bibliophiles protecting their treasures.” – Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream
• “I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable.” – Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
• “But there is so much more in those words than just loving books. I love the smell of them. I love the way their bindings look pressed together on a shelf. I love the feel of pages buzzing through my fingers.” – Ashley Poston, Bookish and the Beast
• “Books aren’t interested in who is reading them… A book will welcome any reader; any age, any background, any point of view. Books don’t care if you can’t understand every word in them, or if you want to skip bits or reread bits. Books welcome everyone who wants to explore them, and thankfully no one has ever worked out a way to stop that.” – Anna James, Tilly and the Lost Fairytales
• “Something significant, magical, and inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.” – Martha Sweeney, Bookish: Adult Coloring Book
• “I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.” – Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones
• “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.” – Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• “Because I’d rather stay home with my books than go out into the world and feel like I don’t measure up.” – Kate Bromley, Talk Bookish to Me
• “Do you know the best feeling in the world? It’s reading a book, loving every second of it, then turning to the front and discovering that the writer wrote fourteen zillion others.” – Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
• “Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.” – Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

Ah, there’s truly nothing like a good stroll through bookish quotes lane. From the aspiring words of authors new and old to the clever and imaginative words that make us want to rush to our bookshelf, we hope you’ve enjoyed the wonders laced in these bookish quotes. Happy reading, bookworms!