Weekly Geeks 2011-19: Notable Quotables

We all have our favorite bookish quotes. Some well known, and some not so well known. This week for our geeky assignment I thought it would be fun for us to share some of those favorites. It can be just one favorite that you'd like to highlight, or a whole list. It can be quotes from books, or quotes about books and reading.

I absolutely love bookish quotes. It always makes me feel good to see someone else express the felling for reading that I have. Here are some of my favorite quotes on books and reading. They have made me smile, laugh, and find kindred spirits among the family that spans time and place..the family of readers. Enjoy!

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he 'has read' them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that settles the matter? -C. S. Lewis from On Stories.

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals. -Samuel Davies

"But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do." -C. S. Lewis from An Experiment in Criticism

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. -Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore? -Henry Ward Beecher

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. -Jane Austen

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. — Madeleine L'Engle

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. —Italo Calvino

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it -- or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it. -Dodie Smith from I Capture the Castle

You think your pains and your heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have been alive. -James Baldwin

Try to avoid your house catching fire, as this does no good at all. And while your house is still intact, it is a sound idea to persuade all babies and animals to live in another one - and if you really value your books, only offer hospitality to illiterates who won't persist in bloody touching them all the time. Mind you, you will have to tolerate them telling you you could open a shop with all these books (people have suggested this to me - in the shop) and betting that you haven't read them all. — Joseph Connolly (Modern First Editions: Their Value to Collectors)