Reading Quotes

Reading is not optional.

~ Walter Dean Myers

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

~ Italo Calvino

How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.

~ Pascal Mercier

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

~ Azar Nafisi

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.

~ Tahir Shah

. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.

~ Ken Kesey

Books are best preserved in the minds of readers.

~ Kat Lowe

When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.

~ Tahir Shah

Find a quiet place, and just read. If you’re reading an ebook, clear away everything else but your ebook reader.Then you settle into the reading, and enjoy it. Bask in the luxury of reading without distractions.

~ Leo Babauta

The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance.

~ Arlo Bates

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

~ Roberto Bolaño

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

~ Wendy Froud

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

~ Gregory Maguire

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

~ Betsy Lerner

Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t want to be one of these bewildered schmucks. The things that you understand will inform your writing. The bigger your mind, the better your work is going to be. You’re not born with a big mind; you have to build it. If I don’t read for an hour a day, I get ill.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder...

~ Eleanor Brown

Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine.

~ Marilynne Robinson

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

~ W.h. Auden

So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

~ Jim Trelease

Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be.That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

~ Bernard Kops

What’d you need?Desuetude.Reading again, are we? Could be dangerous. It means to become unaccustomed to. As in something gets discontinued, falls into disuse.Thanks, man.That it?Yeah, but we should grab a drink sometime.

~ James Sallis

And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago.

~ Milorad Pavić

How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.

~ Gary Shteyngart

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

~ Siri Hustvedt

[When asked about Writing Conferences]You meet people that will change your life.

~ Susan Wingate

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

~ Benedict Of Nursia

Reading Plato should be easy, understanding Plato can be difficult.

~ Robin A.h. Waterfield

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

~ Madeleine L'engle

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the modern from the early modern — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

~ James Shapiro

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

~ Lawrence Wright

In our land of opportunities and distractions, it's hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It's as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can't have the intimate conversation we most yearn for.

~ Steve Leveen

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

~ Don Delillo

Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey...

~ Milorad Pavić

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76

~ Anita Brookner

That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such strategies as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework.

~ Roger Sutton

We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..

~ K.j. Force

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

~ Steven E. Landsburg

an incredibly beautiful read

~ Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo.(Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.)

~ Nick Hornby