top of page
"Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Books quotes

"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."

"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."

"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."

"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."

"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by John Leonard

"Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite."

"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold."
bottom of page