Reading Books Quotes

I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.

~ Sergio Troncoso

Once upon a time in a basement library nook,I stumbled upon my first favorite book.Pulled into adventure as the pages unfurled,I found treasures greater than gold or pearls.

~ Tyrean Martinson

Surround yourself with music. Just be sure to turn the radio on.

~ Lisa M. Cronkhite

He pinched the remaining chapters’ pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

As any avid reader knew, a good read deserved a good seat.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.

~ David S.e. Zapanta

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

~ Haruki Murakami

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

~ Charles T. Munger

...there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality.

~ Félix J. Palma

Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading because we bring a different person to it. It is not you who reads the book, the book reads you

~ Jack Lasenby

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

~ Mem Fox

What is it with you and that book?Rafael laughed. We have a personal relationship.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Antonio-Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma.Peter-Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?

~ Kelley Armstrong

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.

~ Sven Birkerts

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

~ Christopher Isherwood

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

~ Alan Bennett

I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Why do you want to read anyway – for the sake of amusement or mere erudition? Those are poor, fatuous pretexts. Reading should serve the goal of attaining peace; if it doesn’t make you peaceful, what good is it?

~ Epictetus

I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read and write. Even if ‘all night long’ is added, I cannot say it – not until I know the focus of all this energy.

~ Epictetus

Isn’t reading a kind of preparation for life?’ But life is composed of things other than books. It is as if an athlete, on entering the stadium, were to complain that he’s not outside exercising.This was the goal of your exercise, of your weights, your practice ring and your training partners.

~ Epictetus

If, on the other hand, we read books entitled On Impulse not just out of idle curiosity, but in order to exercise impulse correctly; books entitled On Desire and On Aversion so as not to fail to get what we desire or fall victim to what we would rather avoid; and books entitled On Moral Obligation in order to honour our relationships and never do anything that clashes or conflicts with this principle; then we wouldn’t get frustrated and grow impatient with our reading. Instead we would be satisfied to act accordingly. And rather than reckon, as we are used to doing, ‘How many lines I read, or wrote, today,’ we would pass in review how ‘I applied impulse today the way the philosophers recommend

~ Epictetus

Once I was liable to the same mistakes, but, thanks to God, no longer …’Well, isn’t it just as worthwhile to have devoted and applied yourself to this goal as to have read or written fifty pages?

~ Epictetus

Just like a constant diet of fast food makes us flabby, so too a constant intake of social media to the neglect of books and thoughtful meditation will make our brains flabby. So if you find it difficult to read more than five pages at a time, or you find yourself falling asleep as soon as you crack open a book, that is a sign that you should be putting in the work that it takes to be an active reader.

~ Aimee Byrd

If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it.

~ T.a. Uner

Time flies but books are timeless...

~ Nanette L. Avery

I find novels compose my mind. Do you read novels too? - Reverend Finch's wife

~ Wilkie Collins

I've read many more books than you. It doesn't matter how many you've read. I've read more. Believe me.” ― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

~ Nicola Yoon

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

~ Doris Lessing

Books are really places, make no mistake about that.

~ Neil Gaiman

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

~ Eudora Welty

The book you read and read well, over and over again, lives in you, becomes your thought and thinking pattern, teaches you all the time and keeps reminding about how to act and react towards things and occurrences’ in life!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The thing about books was, the more you read and liked them, the more you wanted to have on hand to read. Before you knew it you needed more bookshelves, and then all of the sudden they filled your house.

~ Sui Ishida

Never stop reading, Luke. The words from the pages make me feel like I'm right there, like I can smell the sea and hear the wind. It's my one regret that I didn't read much over the years. How can you learn about all the things happening in the world if you don't read?

~ Lea Davey

...reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts

~ René Descartes

Reading books exposes us to the consistency and uniqueness of being human. Book reading is an investigatory process. We read books in order to encounter the orchestrated words that describe emotions and observations that we too have experienced but are unable to glean the right alignment of words that fully embody the resonance that we seek.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I highly recommend re-reading good personal development books. Rarely can we read a book once and internalized all of the value from that book. Achieving mastery in any area requires repetition—being exposed to certain ideas, strategies, or techniques over and over again, until they become ingrained in your subconscious mind.

~ Hal Elrod

Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer.

~ Pittacus Lore

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

~ Alan Bennett

Paris without a good book is like a pretty girl with only one eye.

~ Naomi Wood