Reading Quotes

Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.

~ Lloyd Alexander

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature, people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple, it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

~ Albert Einstein

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

~ Anthony Trollope

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

~ Joan Didion

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

~ Betty Smith

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

~ Dodie Smith

I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.

~ John Keats

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.

~ Bill Hicks

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

~ John Lubbock

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.

~ Rita Mae Brown

We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.

~ Lloyd Alexander

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

~ Walter Moers

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

~ Italo Calvino

Tris: I was reading. Sandry: You're always reading. The only way people can ever talk to you is to interrupt. Tris: Then maybe they shouldn't talk to me.

~ Tamora Pierce

It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book...from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?

~ John Waters

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

~ David Mitchell

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

~ Vikram Seth

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

~ Vladimir Nabokov

One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.

~ Jeannette Walls

May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.

~ Libba Bray

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

~ Gustave Flaubert

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

~ E.m. Forster

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

~ Lawrence Durrell

I'm wondering what to read next. Matilda said. I've finished all the children's books.

~ Roald Dahl

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.

~ Sara Raasch

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

~ T.s. Eliot

Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

~ George R.r. Martin

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

~ Jonathan Ames

I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.

~ Muriel Barbery

It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

~ Charles Bukowski