Reading Books Quotes

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey -- it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done.

~ Jonathan Carroll

Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.

~ Tomie Depaola

I prefer the company of books. When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you're having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train thought and you accompany each other for weeks on end.

~ Sophie Divry

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

~ Hazel Rochman

There is no other escape like a book. Reading expands your mind and opens your world to a myriad of possibilities.

~ Fran Veal

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

~ Lynne Truss

And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss.

~ Libba Bray

Reading's ability to beam you up to a different world is a good part of the reason why people like me do it in the first place---because dollar for dollar, hour per hour, it's the most expedient way to get from our proscribed little here to an imagined, intriguing there. Part time machine, part Concorde, part ejector seat, books are our salvation.

~ Sara Nelson

Drop everithing and read.

~ Emma Roberts

And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head.

~ Libba Bray

The stories she'd read of others' lives over these last few months had left her with a greater appreciation for the thread of her own life.

~ Masha Hamilton

He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

~ George Eliot

Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.

~ Danny Tyran

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

~ Virginia Woolf

(...) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

~ Terry Pratchett

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

~ Anne Fadiman

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

~ John Hodgman

We may need to put down the book from time to time, but we should make sure not to let the computer become the new book. The universal medium, like the universal library, is a dream that does more harm than good.

~ Andrew Piper