Reading Quotes

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.

~ Mark Glamack

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

~ Benjamin Franklin

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

~ Muriel Barbery

Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.

~ Nicola Yoon

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

~ Tracy Chevalier

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod

~ Salman Rushdie

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

~ Wisława Szymborska

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

~ Alberto Manguel

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

~ Marcel Proust

People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn'

~ Lemmy Kilmister

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!

~ Jan Karon

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

~ Allan Bloom

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

~ Jeanette Winterson

You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.

~ Stephen King

The problem with books is that they end.

~ Caroline Kepnes

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.. . . We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure time, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master’s service. Paul cries, “Bring the books” — join in the cry.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

~ Henry Miller

Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

~ C.s. Lewis

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

~ Gustave Flaubert

You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.

~ Elif Shafak

One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white chargers and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home.

~ Jacqueline Kelly

Libraries raised me.

~ Ray Bradbury

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

…only then did I wake out of the book.

~ John Mcgahern

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

~ Fernando Pessoa

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

~ Gabrielle Zevin

I even love the smell of books.

~ Adriana Trigiani

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

~ Virginia Woolf

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

~ Henry Miller

Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.

~ Adolf Hitler

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

~ Ruta Sepetys

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

~ Umberto Eco

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.

~ Holbrook Jackson

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

~ Franz Kafka