Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.

I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.

Books should cost less and they should be digital.

In terms of e-books, though, I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of it yet, but for some reason everybody I know seems to want to engage me on that topic, or convert me. I think there are a lot of people who just want to hear me embrace e-books or finally say, 'OK, I bought an iPad and it's awesome!" There are a lot of people who would get a kick out of it, that's for sure.

I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.