Reading Quotes

So much of one's life was spent reading, it made sense not to do it alone.

~ Chad Harbach

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

~ Walter Mosley

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

~ Thomas Wolfe

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

~ Werner Herzog

...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

~ Nora Roberts

Reading is a staple of life, like bread or water. Or chocolate.

~ Rett Macpherson

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be-not here - Just Jane (Chapter Four Page 35)

~ Nancy Moser

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

~ Virginia Woolf

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

~ Erica Jong

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

~ W.h. Auden

Reading is an addiction that I adore.

~ Vianka Van Bokkem

I shudder to think of an eternity spend without books. I have hopes that every book that was ever lost is somewhere waiting for me when my life here finally ends.

~ Mel Odom

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

~ John Green

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

~ Virginia Woolf

A book is not completed till it's read.

~ Salman Rushdie

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

~ Charles Lamb

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be insid

~ Patrick Ness

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

~ Isaac Asimov

She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.

~ Michelle Cooper

This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.

~ Anne Frank

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.

~ David Foster Wallace

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?

~ John Green

Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.

~ Lemony Snicket

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

~ Jonathan Franzen

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

~ Alberto Manguel

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

~ Anne Fadiman

Reading to small children is a specialty.

~ Clifton Fadiman

He always thinks because I'm reading, I'm not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.

~ Pierce Brown

Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Them when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team.

~ Karen Witemeyer

Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.

~ Janette Rallison

Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.

~ Nick Hornby

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

~ Roland Barthes

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.

~ Tim Gunn

...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

~ John Steinbeck

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-

~ A.e. Housman

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

~ Samuel Johnson

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.

~ Haruki Murakami

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

~ Ann Patchett