Pat Conroy Quotes

People who fall in love with books never really stop falling.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it.

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

I read some books that were the right books for me. I read them and I didn't even notice turning the pages anymore. I thought, "That's what I want to do with my life."

. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .

I like big books and I cannot lie. You other readers can’t deny That when a kid walks in with The Name of the Wind Like a hardbound brick of win. Story bling. Wanna swipe that thing Cause you see that boy is speeding Right through the book he’s reading. I’m hooked and I can’t stop pleading. Wanna curl up with that for ages, All thousand pages. Reviewers tried to warn me. But with that plot you hooked Me like Bradley. Ooh, crack that fat spine. You know I wanna make you mine. This book is stella ’cause it ain’t some quick novella.

...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

Some women have a weakness for shoes... I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]

He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table. Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.