Reading Quotes

I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the message first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play.

~ Margaret Atwood

I loved college... I knew exactly why I was there and what I wanted to get out of it. I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find our who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it.

~ Jeanette Walls

I have found that the morning is far more accessible when a good book awaits you.

~ Chris Matakas

Reading is like diving into an ocean of an alternate world, away from your real world, where in spite of going though the pain and pleasure of the characters, you remain a witness, unscathed.

~ Anirudha Lakshminarasimhan

To read a poemIs to see light where there is darknessIs to hear silence where there is noiseIs to dance where there is no musicIs to sing where the only instrument is wordsAnd the stirring, impassioned pauses

~ A.a. Patawaran

For a storyteller, an open ending leaves much room for imagination; for the inquisitive reader, however, it is a source of great anxiety.

~ Joyce Rachelle

I can't remember the poemThat pierced through my heartIt was the saddest I heardOf all truths ever spokenIt left a scar in meA wound that doesn't healBut the words are forgottenSo is a big part of me

~ A.a. Patawaran

Reading brings power to the mind and power brings freedom to the mind. Though you ought to read, read what is noble and worthy of not just your time, but your lifetime!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I read for pleasureIn search of fictional worldsTo enrich my truths

~ A.a. Patawaran

F(r)iction is the best of everything we’ve ever loved. F(r)iction is experimental. F(r)iction is strange. F(r)iction pokes the soft spots, touches nerves most would rather remain protected. F(r)iction is secrets and truths and most importantly—stories. F(r)iction is weird, in every respect.

~ Tethered By Letters

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.

~ H.g. Wells

As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.

~ Andrew Wilson

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democrac.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.

~ Alan Bradley

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

~ Anna Dewdney

How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.

~ Justin Cronin

I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?

~ Molly O'keefe

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

~ China Miéville

It was always after reading tales such as these that she wondered how on earth it was that some young ladies did not read at all, or declared they had no interest in it. Didn't they know how you could feel so much from a book? Didn't they know how your heart could race and break from words on a page? Had they never read something so wonderful and horrible that they felt as though the very would should stop and pause to acknowledge the depth of feeling it produced?

~ Margaux Gillis

I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.

~ Rabih Alameddine

I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple minds who can't take in the strong content they provide

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.

~ Alice Hoffman

Books … they’re kind of a compulsion for me. To find a great bookstore is a great thing.

~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

Growing up in the digital age, I'm expected to embrace all forms of modern technology with blissful ignorance. Books were always one of few escapes from this, because reading a book means not having to look at another damned glowing screen - which is why, no matter how convenient or enhanced digital enthusiasts claim that Ebooks are, I'll never see them as real books. They're just files of binary data, and while they might be considered books by a large amount of people, Ebooks have lost the human quality that real books have. You can argue that this is pretentious or stupid or nostalgic, but ultimately what will you pass down to your children and grandchildren? A broken old Kindle device with the same files that millions of other people have, or the dog-eared paperbacks that you fell in love with and wrote your name in and got signed by the author and flipped through in the bookstore and kept with you for years, like an old friend?

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.

~ Sarah Crossan

Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.

~ Jenny Colgan

So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.

~ Terri Windling

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier; to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduct between the two worlds.

~ Jenny Colgan

Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

I'm the same way about the bookshop. You know, I walk around and I feel the whole world is in there, the most important stories of all time.

~ Caroline Kepnes

When we buy books we're fooling ourselves into thinking we buy the time to read them.

~ Gerard Vanderleun

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.

~ Pierre Bayard

Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.

~ Adriana Trigiani

Listening to podcast, reading a book, listening to an aduibook and watching films isn't waste of time. It's how somebody becomes wise!

~ Deyth Banger

School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That’s all there is to it.

~ Yannick Murphy

When you come to any passage you don't understand, read it again: if you still don't understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.

~ Lewis Carroll

You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley