Reading Quotes

Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give permission to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.

~ Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Plans make dreams reality.

~ Susan Pace-Koch

I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.

~ Katherine Hannigan

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

~ Kathy Acker

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

~ Thomas Mann

There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.

~ James Patterson

We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.

~ Alan Jacobs

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'Why do you read then?'Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times. ...

~ W. Somerset Maugham

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

~ Wilkie Collins

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

~ Gary Shteyngart

There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...

~ Moïra Fowley-Doyle

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

~ Eleanor Brown

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

~ Edgar Watson Howe

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

~ Francis Bacon

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

~ Nick Hornby

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

~ Ayn Rand

No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

~ Nick Hornby

At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.

~ Tasha Alexander

Reading is more important than writing.

~ Roberto Bolaño

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.

~ William Hope Hodgson

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.

~ Helene Hanff

A blessed companion is a book--a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend...a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into your own.

~ Douglas William Jerrold

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

~ John Green

What's cheaper than a gallon of gas? An ebook. Save a dollar, stay home and read!

~ Shandy L. Kurth

Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.

~ Jo Walton

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading every day keeps the brain dead sickness away.

~ Kristy Pellegrin

Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal!

~ Dick Meyer

Reading is an activity of civilized beings.

~ Toba Beta

You may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me.

~ Strickland Gillian

Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.

~ John Steinbeck

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

~ Aldous Huxley

My eyes hunger to read more books then time allows me to devour.

~ Jazz Feylynn

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

~ Avi Steinberg

Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawingup at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.

~ Jane Austen

With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.

~ Aldous Huxley

Louis said, There ought to be a comic book about geeks.Dr. McNaughton said, There are books about geeks.He said, There are?Dr. McNaughton said, I'll read you some Faulkner sometime. I'll read you some Eudora Welty, some Flannery O'Connor. Geeks, midgets, anything your heart desires. Better than comic books.Louis looked at his father. He said, You'll read to me? Really?

~ Lewis Nordan

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

~ Anne Fadiman