Book Care Quotes

Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Are you kidding? I'm supposed to put my books in this filthy tin coffin?

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.

I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So…a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian’s opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.

Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care.

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.

Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)