Classic Book Quotes About Reading, Books and Literature

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”

Caroline Bingley says this while pretending to read in order to attract Darcy. He is reading; she is performing reading. The line works because Austen gives it to a character who does not mean it. If you have ever seen the same line on a bookshop tote bag, that bag is, technically, quoting a villain.

“She confused, in her desire, the sensualities of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment.”

Emma's confusion is a reading injury. Flaubert's whole novel is an argument that bad novels produce bad lives by giving people the wrong sentences to feel with. The best argument for taking reading seriously is also Flaubert's most cynical paragraph about it.

“I read and re-read Werter; I considered the work of a divine being.”

The creature self-educates with Goethe, Plutarch and Milton found in a satchel. Mary Shelley's argument: literacy is what makes the creature articulate, and articulacy is what makes his loneliness unbearable. He understands exactly what he is missing because he has read about it.

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect.”

After reading Paradise Lost the creature has the precise sentence for his loneliness. Shelley uses Milton not as backdrop but as evidence in the creature's argument that his abandonment is theological as well as personal. Reading does not console; it sharpens.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Wilde's defence of aestheticism, written after the novel itself had caused a scandal. The line is true as far as it goes. It is also a bluff: the novel contains Sibyl Vane's suicide as the price of Dorian's first cruelty. Wilde defended the book as if it were not the book.

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.”

Wilde warning readers and critics at the same time. The point is that the novel will show each reader something different. Reading, in Wilde's view, is not retrieval; it is projection, and the projector is responsible for the picture.

“Exterminate all the brutes!”

Kurtz's seventeen-page Suppression of Savage Customs report ends with this pencil note. Conrad is making a precise point about reading: a high-minded document and the violence it authorises are the same author at different stages of his honesty. To read carefully is to keep reading to the postscript.

“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, it were better to live so than to die at once.”

Raskolnikov before going to the police, recycling a passage he half-remembers. Dostoevsky's argument: a reader's mind under pressure will scavenge the books it has read for survival material. The fragment does not get attribution because the function it serves is more important than the source.

“I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

Marley to Scrooge. Not directly about books, but a perfect description of what reading habits do over a lifetime: a chain made of small links. Each book read or unread, each sentence taken seriously or shrugged off. The image holds for libraries as well as ledgers.

“Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

The narrator stating her own view in her diary. Doubly personally, because she knows her view will be treated as personal, not medical. The story is partly an argument for writing in the absence of permission to be read. Reading and writing, in 1892, were what kept a woman in possession of her own mind.