Shelves Quotes

“I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books.”
― Laini Taylor

“My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“La memoria es como libro en el cual se escribe toda nuestra vida. Algunas veces deseamos cerrarlo y olvidarlo para no recordar todos los escabrosos detalles, y otras veces deseamos abrirlo y observarlo detenidamente, queriendo volver a sentir lo mismo que sentimos en aquel momento.”
― Audrey Dry, Sin mirar atrás

“I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than the next, and two overstuffed chairs big enough for me to sleep in.”
― Clay Carmichael, Wild Things

“—¿Cómo una persona puede sentirse sola cuando está rodeada de gente? —le pregunté.
—Supongo que en eso consiste la soledad —me respondió—. En aislarte cuando se supone que tienes que sentirte rodeada.”
― Audrey Dry, Sin mirar atrás

“She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“People like to be shown around archives. I don’t know why. I’m in the business, but one row of shelves stuffed with manila files looks much like another.”
― V.T. Davy, Black Art

“Y, entonces, en ese instante que tan solo dura un segundo, el cerebro se encarga de abrir la cerradura del cofre en el cual guardas todo lo que aprecias. Cede de tal manera que la tapa se abre y todo lo que hay en el interior sale de forma tan rápida y tan fugaz que no puedes detenerlo.”
― Audrey Dry, Sin mirar atrás

“They ended up at the Old Corner Bookstore, which Brian had read about in a tour guide to Boston. "Longfellow and Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes used to read here. Let's go in." Brian nudged the girls until they obeyed.

It was a regular bookstore, less history-minded than Brian had expected. In fact, the local history shelves were quite mangeable. I'll buy one book, he thought. This will get me launched in actual reading. Out of the zillions of choices, I'll find one here.

Brian picked out Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It was thick and somehow exciting, with its chapter headings and scholarly notes and bibliography.”
― Caroline B. Cooney

“facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“He saw my confusion and led me a slow, stately march to the library. There were shelves all the way around the room, and every shelf was crowed with books. I had not thought so many books existed.[...] There was a desk, several big leather chairs, a wooden floor covered with faded rugs, and in front of the fireplace a sofa with soft pillows. The shelves stopped several feet short of the ceiling, leaving room for a row of busts of what I imagined must be famous gentlemen. Lamps cast little pools light in the room, and the sound and smell of the fire reminded me of the fires the Kikuyu would make outside theirs huts when they roasted goats.”
― Gloria Whelan, Listening for Lions

“Pienso que cada uno es como un libro, con una sinopsis diferente y una portada distinta. Cada libro está en su estantería correspondiente y en su balda adecuada junto con otros libros similares. Yo, en cambio, soy un libro solitario, abandonado en un estante olvidado.”
― Audrey Dry, Sin mirar atrás

“... suffice to say, joy is where you find it- usually on the shelf right next to sadness.”
― Ingrid Schaffner, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations

“Shelved around us lie the mummied authors.”
― Bayard Taylor

“So many books, so little storage space.”
― Scott Edward Shjefte (Sesame) January 2, 2025

“The day I filled my little larder with jars of beans and seeds, sugars and flours, was one I had looked forward to all my cooking life. A little space for tins of sardines and bottles of anchovies, a dark corner for dried shiitake and porcini, and a home for tins of treacle and golden syrup. There was an entire shelf for vinegars, a tall one for bottles of rose and orange blossom water and shallow ones for slim boxes of crystallized violets and jars of candied orange and citron peel. Two pink egg cartons sat on the marble slab along with space for pots of marmalade and damson gin.
Over the years the larder has changed a little, and I soon realized I needed to make space not just for dried beans (flageolet, cannellini, ful, chickpeas, chana dal, green and brown lentils-- I could go on), but also for bottled and tinned. Dried fruits now take up eight storage jars and there are at least six of rice (white and brown basmati, arborio and pudding rice, sushi rice and a Spanish rice called bomba that makes a delicious paella and produces a fine undercrust). My obsession with storage jars is a result of a personal concern over opened cellophane bags of ingredients in the cupboard, bags that fall or unfold allowing the contents to spill or spoil.
You can often tell the time of year by peeping through the larder door. At Christmas I juggle jars and bottles to make space for beribboned packages of panettone and Stollen, golden tins of Lebkuchen and the muslin-wrapped Christmas pudding. In summer the marble slab is a useful space for ripening peaches and melons.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts