Reading Quotes

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

~ Robertson Davies

Honestly, I hate when in books, the guys changes the girl's life. Like, no. The girl needs to change her own life.

~ Sasha Alsberg

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

~ Diane Setterfield

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.

~ Cecelia Ahern

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

~ Anne Brontë

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

~ René Descartes

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

~ Karen Marie Moning

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

~ John Waters

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

~ Francis Bacon

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a

~ E.b. White

Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.

~ Pseudonymous Bosch

You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.

~ Cassandra Clare

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

~ Alain De Botton

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.

~ David Levithan

As always, one of her books was next to her.

~ Markus Zusak

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

~ Markus Zusak

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

~ Anne Fadiman

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the 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.

~ Italo Calvino

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

~ Anne Fadiman

[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

~ Simon Van Booy

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

~ George W. Bush

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

No two persons ever read the same book.

~ Edmund Wilson

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

~ Marcel Proust

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

~ Umberto Eco

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

~ Alberto Manguel

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.

~ Diane Setterfield

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

~ Dean Koontz

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

~ Bill Watterson

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.

~ Erika Johansen

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

~ Libba Bray

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.

~ Sarah J. Maas

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

~ Benjamin Franklin

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

~ Harold Bloom

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

~ Malcolm X