Roger Angell Quotes

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

Ted Williams is one of the best hitters ever to play the game, and I didn't get a chance to see him play, so all I could do was read books and look at pictures.

I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

My library is an archive of longings.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

I have always loved reading. Ever since I was a young girl I had a book by my bed and would get lost in the world of make believe.

Home is where your books are.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

Rough board shelves hold a number of books, without which some of the evenings would be long indeed.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.