Reading Quotes

You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.

~ Anthony Horowitz

Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.

~ Peter Mendelsund

I look upon fine phrases as a lover. - John Keats

~ Beatrice K. Otto

If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.

~ Laurent Binet

I’ve lowered my character with a great deal of unwholesome reading material.

~ Lisa Kleypas

like traveling without knowing what country you’re going to

~ Austin Wright

Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don;t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

~ Eudora Welty

I amMavis Elizabeth Betterly.I amused to hard work.I canrun a household betterthan Mrs. Oblinger ever could.What does it matter,those thingsthat hold me back?What does it matterwhen I make mistakes?They don't make mewhoIam.

~ Caroline Starr Rose

Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.

~ Anonymous

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

~ Yann Martel

I have noticed that when people tell their own stories, often it has less to do with wanting to communicate an idea to another than with clarifying an emotion to themselves. Or when the subject of the story is beloved and missing, as a way to make them here and alive.

~ Lydia Minatoya

A good story invites us into someone else's world where we learn, discover commonalities, and leave with compassion and understanding.

~ Lynda Cheldelin Fell

Our masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they’re also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don’t. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously.

~ Beth Revis

Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.

~ Nick Lake

But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond.....

~ Amor Towles

The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.

~ Peter Mendelsund

They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment… She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn’t her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn’t she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids’ book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.

~ Maile Meloy

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

~ Pamela Paul

One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional—it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story.

~ Angie Thomas

You can tell a lot about a person's priorities in life by reading their will.

~ Steven Magee

Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.

~ Virginia Woolf

Reading thus introduces an art which is anything but passive.

~ Michel De Certeau

Get a good book, get few bottles of water or few cups of tea/coffee or Chocolate milk and start reading.

~ Deyth Banger

The girl whose table I occupied was reading a book but I couldn’t help but notice that all this time, she was secretly watching me.“You are beautiful.”I took my eyes off my phone and I saw the girl talking to me. I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say or how to react.

~ Nico J. Genes

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

~ Azar Nafisi

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

~ Azar Nafisi

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?

~ Laini Taylor

There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.

~ Louis Althusser

Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them

~ Malebo Sephodi

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

~ Margaret Atwood

Love is quite like reading, I expect. Once you know how, you can't ever imagine not doing it.

~ Kerrigan Byrne

Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.

~ Richard Seaver

Sometimes a book that appeared dull or off-putting would somehow still draw you in, call to you, and when you finally embarked on the adventure inside you found yourself partaking in something wondrous and unfathomably rich.

~ Liam W. Russell

I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.

~ Han Nolan

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

You know what it's like to *lose* yourself in a story. We have brother and sister *souls*.

~ Mike Carey

When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather.

~ Joyce Rachelle

What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.

~ Will Advise

A reading appetite is quirky, singular, and essential

~ Penny Kittle

At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing

~ Pamela Paul