Reading Quotes

An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.

~ Thomas Wharton

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.

~ Guy Gavriel Kay

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

~ Anna Quindlen

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

~ Anne Fadiman

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.

~ Shannon Hale

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

~ Abraham Lincoln

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

~ Alberto Manguel

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

~ E.m. Forster

I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad, perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of their elusive affections.

~ Cammie Mcgovern

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.

~ Douglas Coupland

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

~ The Economist

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

~ Virginia Woolf

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

~ Paxton Hood

This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

~ Maxine Hong Kingston

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

~ Sara Nelson

We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.

~ Kevin Smokler

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.

~ Yoshida Kenkō

What is reading but silent conversation.

~ Walter Savage Landor

Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.

~ George R.r. Martin

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

~ José Saramago

There’s nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.

~ Betty Macdonald

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.

~ Aidan Chambers

I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

~ Marilynne Robinson

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

~ Thomas Carlyle

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

~ J.k. Rowling

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

~ Anne Fadiman

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

~ Alberto Manguel

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

~ Anthony Doerr

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

~ Julia Quinn

She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

~ Neil Gaiman

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our

~ William Hazlitt