Reading Quotes

What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.

~ Pierre Bayard

The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.

~ Dave Mearns

Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.

~ Sarah Van Arsdale

In great thick dusty books he readAnd hardly ever went to bedBefore it was e

~ Mervyn Peake

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

~ Edna Ferber

But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.

~ Cecelia Ahern

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

~ Rick Bragg

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

~ Kamand Kojouri

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.

~ Max Beerbohm

The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I’ve had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

~ Pat Conroy

I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

~ Pat Conroy

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I know, Ezra, that I tend to be a bit impulsive at times, but it all seems so reasonable at the time I do these things, and so unreasonable when everyone looks back at what happened and what I did

~ L.a. Meyer

Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.

~ Donna J. Haraway

I couldn’t comprehend why she still hadn’t stopped him because it’s clearly every mother’s responsibility to protect her children. After all, that’s the trust that bonds a mother and her child together, forever

~ Veronika Gasparyan

He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Senor Sempere believed we are all a part of something, and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost, but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain” (p. 348).

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and associations, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

~ Barry López

Books can kill you, while you are reading.

~ Deyth Banger

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.

~ Keith Miller

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.

~ Caitlin Moran

Read! It is as important as breathing until you are breathing.

~ Hira Shahid Kazim

My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act nicely. I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention

~ Hope Jahren

I think, therefore I am?No, I simply am.I am. I am. I am.I will still be if I didn't think. In fact, it is only then that I would step into a different dimension of consciousness.Yes, I will still be if I didn't think. I will still be if I stopped breathing. I will still be because you still are. My words are written and you are receiving them. We are dancing. We are making love.And when you stop reading them, they will still be because nothing ever truly ceases to exist. There is not a thing that is not. Every thought, energy, and vibration is recycled. I am and I will continue to be because I manifest as the universe, therefore I will continue to manifest as the universe.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Read every day and learn from what you read.

~ Octavia E. Butler

When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.

~ Ann Hood

If you read a book which does not make you wonder, ponder!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If I say I don't want to read the book, I don't want to read the book.

~ Gillian Flynn

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

~ Max Lerner

Reading & Thinking Breeds limitless progress.

~ Auliq Ice

But I cant' translate it the right way, that's why I always use so many foreign languages around you, because there're some things that simply can't translate, that are beautiful when you read them the original way.

~ Darknessandlight

In truth, Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.

~ Neil Gaiman

You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

To be perfectly honest, I think she became sick of Society during her debut season. Better to lock herself in her room with her books than to spend her life paying calls and going to balls.

~ Shanna Swendson

Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.

~ Aimee Bender

The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

~ Edith Wharton

Addiction to reading... There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to. I admire your hobby choice it's mine as well.

~ Christy A. Mair