Reading Quotes

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

~ Stephen Fry

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

~ Joseph Joubert

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

~ Stéphane Mallarmé

My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

~ Malcolm X

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

~ Jules Verne

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

~ Hilary Mantel

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

~ Gary Paulsen

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

~ Anne Lamott

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

~ Carl Sagan

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

~ Angela Carter

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

~ John Berger

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

~ David Mitchell

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

~ J.k. Rowling

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

~ John Green

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

~ David Baldacci

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.

~ Roald Dahl

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

~ Ezra Pound

We live and breathe words.

~ Cassandra Clare

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

~ George Gissing

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

~ Betty Smith

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working m

~ Carl Sagan

Literature is news that stays news.

~ Ezra Pound

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

~ Cornelia Funke

Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.

~ Jasper Fforde

That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

~ Jane Austen

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

~ Roald Dahl

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

~ Charles Baudelaire

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

~ Ray Bradbury

I guess there are never enough books.

~ John Steinbeck

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

~ Roald Dahl

The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

~ Gail Carson Levine

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

~ Voltaire

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

~ Anna Quindlen

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

~ Anne Herbert

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

~ Voltaire