Not exactly a quote, but a little story.

Mark Twain asked his neighbour if he could borrow one of his books. His neighbour said "Well, you can read it, but you'll have to read it in my house. I make it a rule that none of my books leave my library."

A few days later, the neighbour asked Twain if he could borrow his lawn mower. "Certainly," said Twain; "But you'll have to use it in my garden. You know I make it a rule..."

I bought a Karen Neuburger winter nightgown on sale yesterday. When I cut the tags off, one was a small folder that had Celebrating Books at Bedtime, 2007 Collection, on the front. Inside, it says, "Books stir the senses, inspire the imagination, and spark a love of reading that can last a lifetime. By purchasing this product, you are helping KN Ltd. and First Book give children in need the opportunity to read and own their first new books." It has two websites on it: www.firstbook.org and www.karenneuburger.com to learn more about their program.

As if I need more incentive to buy more stuff, but I find it interesting that a company has gotten involved in such a worthwhile project.

I've been lurking and making lists of books to read, but had to come out of the shadows because this is such a great thread.

Woodnymph, here are some favorites:

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. ~Dorothy Parker

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. ~Mark Twain

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~Groucho Marx

Ok, this may be a little long... but I love it.

Umberto Eco's "How To Justify a Private Library".

[For] people who possess a fairly sizable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house canÂt help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place), a visitor enters and says "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books...

But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse...

In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. 'I haven't read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?' but this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: 'And where do you put them after you've read them?' The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: 'And more, dear sir, many more,' which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: 'No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,' a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.

I've always wanted to stencil this on a wall.....

"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing." Cicero

**sigh**

Eco seems like my kind of guy!

I have three posted on my wall:

Solemn Spaces Without Joy
There is an architecture of books as surely as there is one of buildings. When you read a book, you enter by its cover, but you live within the spatial environment that its pages throw up around you. You inhabit its margins, whether commodious or cramped; you ambulate among the serifed glyphs of the typography; you respond to the climate of the page, pure white or mottled beige, and even negotiate the textured terrain of the paper itself, whether it be the alabastrine smoothness of bible stock or the porosity of wood pulp ~James Gardner.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. ~P.J. O'Rourke

E.M Forster: "Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West."

going up for cmk et. al

I have a panel from a comic strip that I use as a bookmark. It's Opus (by Berkeley Breathed)the little penguin, propped up in bed surrounded by books. He's saying "Book lovers never go to bed alone."
I'd have to second that!

I just "Googled" the phrase "Book lovers never go to bed alone" and found an interesting website. Take a look.
http://www.cafepress.com/fsotherstuff
(I have no connection with this website at all--first time I've ever seen it.)

Thank you for bumping this up CC!

One of my favs:

"Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have others too, but they are only from books, not about them.
CMK

I thought about this thread when I discovered the following quote about books on the back cover of a book I checked out from the library.

"They relieve me from idleness, rescue me from company I dislike, and blunt the edge of my grief, if it is not too extreme. They are the comfort and solitude of my old age. When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as the running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind. And they don't rebel because I use them only for lack of pastimes more natural and alive. They always receive me with welcome." --- Montaigne

Sarah, I love this and have copied it into my list of quotes.

carolyn - I thought it really expressed the way I feel about books and reading.

"Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning." Rose Macaulay

"Choose an author as you would choose a friend."
Wentworth Dillon.

"When I want to read a novel, I write one."
Benjamin Disrraeli

"Books support us in our solitude and and keep us from being a burden to ourselves."
Jeremy Collier

"You know that you have read a good book when you turn the last page a little as if you have lost a friend."
Paul Sweeny

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter any other way."
Caroline Gordon

'Without libraries where are we? We have no past and no future."
Ray Bradbury

"My test of a good novel is dreading to read the last chapter."
Thomas Helm

"There is no faster or firmer friendships than those between people who love the same books."
Irving Stone

"Books may be the only true magic."
Alice Hoffman

Ooh. I love the Hoffman quote. Thanks.

If any of us has ever read Alice Hoffman you will notice that she always adds some magic into the plot.

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body".
Joseph Addison

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours".
John Locke

JuneK, the Hoffman quote has long been a favorite of mine also. Just to know that what someone else was thinking leaves his mind and is transferred to paper, and from there, taken in by another's mind. And the original thinker may have been dead for a thousand or more years! It IS magic.