Reading Quotes

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

~ Haruki Murakami

I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.

~ Love The Stacks Bookstore

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

~ Lloyd Alexander

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

~ Susan Sontag

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.

~ Robert Goolrick

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

~ Laurie Anderson

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

~ Stephen R. Covey

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

~ Rebecca Mead

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

~ Philip Pullman

All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn't so sure.

~ Lemony Snicket

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

~ Laura Hillenbrand

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.

~ Susan Hill

We become the books we read.

~ Matthew Kelly

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain

~ Louisa May Alcott

You're either reading a book or you're not.

~ Jonathan Franzen

great books are the ones we need

~ Charles Bukowski

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

~ Alberto Manguel

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

A Book “Now” - said a good book unto me -“Open my pages and you shall seeJewels of wisdom and treasures fine,Gold and silver in every line,And you may claim them if you but willOpen my pages and take your fill.“Open my pages and run them o’er,Take what you choose of my golden store.Be you greedy, I shall not care -All that you seize I shall gladly spare;There is never a lock on my treasure doors,Come - here are my jewels, make them yours!“I am just a book on your mantel shelf,But I can be part of your living self;If only you’ll travel my pages through,Then I will travel the world with you.As two wines blended make better wine,Blend your mind with these truths of mine.“I’ll make you fitter to talk with men,I’ll touch with silver the lines you pen,I’ll lead you nearer the truth you seek,I’ll strengthen you when your faith grows weak -This place on your shelf is a prison cell,Let me come into your mind to dwell!

~ Edgar A. Guest

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

~ Nick Hornby

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

~ Alberto Manguel

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

~ Ray Bradbury

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.

~ Lewis Buzbee

Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.

~ Kellie Elmore

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

~ George Herbert

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

~ Kelly Link

The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.

~ Jay Kristoff

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

~ Holbrook Jackson

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

~ Alberto Manguel

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

~ Stanisław Lem

I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

~ Roman Payne

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

~ Michel Foucault

I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

~ Laura Miller

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

~ Jean Rhys