Reading Quotes

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

~ David Mitchell

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

~ Italo Calvino

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

~ Gustave Flaubert

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

~ Logan Pearsall Smith

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

~ Criss Jami

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.

~ Helen Exley

My life is a reading list.

~ John Irving

Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.

~ Jaachynma N.e. Agu

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

~ Sherman Alexie

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

~ Azar Nafisi

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

~ Ruth Rendell

Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.

~ Jaachynma N.e. Agu

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...

~ Michel Houellebecq

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

~ Ray Bradbury

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the shalt nots of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

~ Anna Quindlen

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

~ Nicole Krauss

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Associate with the noblest people you can find, read the best books, live with the mighty, but learn to be happy alone.

~ Saul Bellow

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

~ C.s. Lewis

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

~ Louis L'amour

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

~ Joseph Campbell

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

~ Alberto Manguel

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

~ Eudora Welty

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

~ John Connolly

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

~ Socrates

There is no such thing as a child who hates to read, there are only children who have not found the right book.

~ Frank Serafini

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.

~ Neil Gaiman

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

~ Stephen King

Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.

~ Jackson Pearce

A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.

~ Richard P. Denney

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

~ Groucho Marx

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

~ Groucho Marx

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

~ Karen Marie Moning

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them

~ Italo Calvino

There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.

~ E. Nesbit

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

They're book addicts.

~ Lemony Snicket