Reading Quotes

No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally worth reading at the age of 50.

~ Gladys M. Hunt

My books are a word feast.

~ Lori R. Lopez

Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.

~ Janna Malamud Smith

Even in the hottest fire there's a bit of water. my The Opposite Of Magic.

~ Ivan Stoikov

One can fight money only with money! from my Tale Of The Rock Pieces.

~ Ivan Stoikov

I will gladly accept any and all books, however. A person can never have too much reading material. Especially on a fall or winter evening. If you’re feeling extra generous, you may include tea. I love a unique blend.

~ Kerri Maniscalco

Books long to be read as we humans long to be loved.

~ Keira Michelle Telford

...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

~ Charles Dickens

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

~ Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o

The Kraken was somewhat obsessed with posture. As for Lily, she barely gave it a second thought. In her opinion it was better to read books than balance them. That’s what they were designed for, after all. And if you wanted to wear something on your head there was a perfectly good item designed for that too: it was called a hat.

~ Peter Bunzl

Reading a book is like living a deep and fulfilling life. Watching a movie is like being a paralyzed person: watching others live their lives while you observe from the sidelines.

~ Charbel Tadros

Warning...well-loved stories are habit forming...

~ Nanette L. Avery

Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.

~ Lisa Bu

Reading is all about losing and finding yourself.

~ Mahrukh

You can’t give what you don’t have. To write, you must read. To write well, read well.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

~ W.g. Sebald

Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

~ Pierre Bayard

Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.

~ Pierre Bayard

In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

You don't have books?!' Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. 'How can you live without reading?''Pretty well so far.' I laughed. 'Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.''Says who? I think they're a different way of telling the truth.' Then, 'Seriously - no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you've been missing! Stories are food and drink and life...I mean, haven't you heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?''A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that...?''Well,' said Rose. 'Once upon a time...'And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The End.

~ Lucy Adlington

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Never a day without a line.

~ Anonymous

I knew all about reading a lot. About how it could take you to a world what was better than the real one. A world where there were adventures and mysteries and magic. Except, of course, books ended eventually, and then you had to go back to being yourself.

~ Chelsea Sedoti

If you only read books, how will you read the scripture inside you?

~ Tapan Ghosh

Books were cities I'd never visited, filled with pillars of great thoughts and streets of phrases, mazes of abstruse sentence structures and alleys of complicated syllables. They were stores that displayed a wide range of things, punctuation twinkling like the crest of a venerable family, sentences breathing peacefully, words whispering.

~ Jung-Myung Lee

Even the most ill-formed words, set to paper, are a great blessing.

~ Ruthanna Emrys

Regina read all this, thinking with each sentence she'd put the book down. But a sentence became a paragraph, which flowed on into a page, two pages, a chapter, more.

~ Deborah Johnson

Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in facts just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...?

~ Scarlett Thomas

It plumps up your thinker and fills up your heart. And where you end up is not where you start.

~ Brynne Barnes

Books are the way to stretch out people's souls, and I won't have children with small souls.

~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

Books and workshops and gurus are great, but the very best teacher for your mind is, and will always be, your heart.

~ Scott Stabile

Yeah, I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.

~ Victoria Schwab

I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

You should read this book’ almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself.

~ Pamela Paul

Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. ‘You have to read a book at the right time for you,’ Lessing also said, ‘and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

~ Pamela Paul

When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.

~ Pamela Paul

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

~ Pamela Paul

When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read.

~ Pamela Paul

Books will never die out as long as there are people around.

~ Anthony T. Hincks