Reading Quotes

Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

~ Andrew Lang

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

~ Anna Quindlen

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

~ Susan Sontag

The Babar the Elephant book is sitting in front of me. I pick it up and start reading it. I remember reading it as a small Boy and enjoying it and imagining that I was friends with Babar, his constant Companion during all of his adventures. He went to the moon, I went with him. He fought Tomb Raiders in Egypt, I fought alongside him. He rescued his elephant girlfriend from Ivory Hunters on the Savanna, I coordinated the getaway. I loved that goddamn Elephant and I loved being his friend. In a childhood full of unhappiness and rage, Babar is one of the few pleasant memories that I have. Me and Babar, kicking some motherfucking ass.

~ James Frey

Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.

~ Tom Bissell

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

~ Ray Bradbury

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic.

~ Martha V. Parravano

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

~ Aleister Crowley

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

~ John Dunning

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

~ Mark Vonnegut

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

~ Margaret Atwood

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

~ Cornelia Funke

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

~ Bruno Bettelheim

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

~ Eudora Welty

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

~ Ali Smith

I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!

~ Jennifer Donnelly

My idea of a fun night was diving into a massive pile of To Be Read pile of books stacked near my dresser... I was the girl who loved everything geeky.

~ Jeff Sampson

My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

~ Edward Gibbon

Guess I’ve been reading too much fantasy.

~ Aprilynne Pike

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

~ Anna Quindlen

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

~ Peter Ustinov

But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.

~ Matt De La Pena

You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.

~ James Patterson

Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.

~ Richard Carlson

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

~ Alberto Manguel

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

~ Montesquieu

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

~ Alan Bennett

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

~ Harriet Martineau

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

~ Anna Godbersen

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

~ Diane Setterfield

All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.

~ Kathryn Magendie

When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.

~ Kathleen Norris

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

~ A.l. Kennedy

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.

~ Alan Jacobs

And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

~ David Mccullough Jr.

Aw, fudge,' floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. 'You're a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?'I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. 'After five hundred years, you've read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.

~ Karen Chance

Most of my reading is rereading.

~ Susan Sontag

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

~ Novalis