Reading Quotes

And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.

~ Thomas Ligotti

Reading is not like this... read and read without understanding you just want to finish the book... I had such moments but it's the worst decision ever made. The reading should be process in which you go deeper and deeper, you understand it... you like it... you try to be the same character.... you enjoy it and you want more and more... you have more and more curiousity.

~ Deyth Banger

We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits...so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'tis then we get the right good from the book.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Good aims not always make good books.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Watch, how the sunslowly risesfrom behind my earnew lines, new countriesspring up in my palmsmy rough hairbecome swaying silkand all the leavesin my bodybecome lusher than fruits.

~ Sanober Khan

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

~ W.b. Yeats

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

~ Roy Peter Clark

I glare at him and sigh. “Don't you understand what a book is?”“Obviously.”“Then how can it be boring? It's not just twenty-six little letters all mushed together to make words that link together to tell a story. It's the creation of another world where anything can happen and anyone can be whoever they want to be. It's a crazy, special kind of magic that can transport you out of the real world, to anywhere you want to go. It doesn't matter if it's a made-up universe or it's written in a city you can drive to within an hour. It's what happens within the pages that makes reading so...not boring.”-Emma Hart Dirty Little Rendezvous (The Burke Brothers Spin-Off #1).

~ Emma Hart

Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.'There's a library?''Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.

~ Ransom Riggs

Our children start out as good readers and will remain so if the adults around them nourish their enthusiasm instead of trying to prove themselves. If we stimulate their desire to learn before making them recite out loud; if we support them in their efforts instead of trying to catch them out; if we give up whole evenings instead of trying to save time; if we make the present come alive without threatening them with the future; if we refuse to turn pleasure into a chore but nurture it instead. If we do all this, we ourselves will rediscover the pleasure of giving freely-- because all cultural apprenticeship is free.

~ Daniel Pennac

If reading isn't about communication, it is, in the end, about sharing. But a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing.

~ Daniel Pennac

Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love).Stolen from what?From the tyranny of living.

~ Daniel Pennac

We human beings build houses because we're alive, but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either.

~ Daniel Pennac

That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.

~ David Foster Wallace

I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while.

~ Becky Watson

A writer who doesn’t read is like a director who doesn’t watch movies.

~ Kira Hawke

Reading enlightens my mind and fills my soul.

~ Brenda Kay Winters

What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.

~ Daniel Pennac

Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!

~ Daniel Pennac

Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding-- or wanting to admit-- that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.

~ Daniel Pennac

We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little--set time, set gestures-- was like a prayer.

~ Daniel Pennac

Of all the queer sources of romance, ours lay in the discovery that each was an addict of Boswell's Life of Johnson. H.E.G. had a first edition of the Journey to the Hebrides, which I coveted mightily. Why not acquire the book honorably, marry the man, and have it around the house?

~ Beatrice Fairfax

Never interrupt someone who is reading because they’re no longer in your world.

~ J.a. George

The sessions with Mr. Dubois continued, but it was in the private parlor of Abigail Braddock that Sarah Biddle received the greatest knowledge, for in Mrs. Braddock's private parlor Sarah Biddle learned not only to read books, but also to love them.

~ Stephanie Grace Whitson

How can I survive without a book to read?

~ David Hill

And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

~ Lyndsay Faye

The ceaseless rain is falling fast,And yonder gilded vane,Immovable for three days past,Points to the misty main,It drives me in upon myselfAnd to the fireside gleams,To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,And still more pleasant dreams,I read whatever bards have sungOf lands beyond the sea,And the bright days when I was youngCome thronging back to me.In fancy I can hear againThe Alpine torrent's roar,The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,The sea at Elsinore.I see the convent's gleaming wallRise from its groves of pine,And towers of old cathedrals tall,And castles by the Rhine.I journey on by park and spire,Beneath centennial trees,Through fields with poppies all on fire,And gleams of distant seas.I fear no more the dust and heat,No more I feel fatigue,While journeying with another's feetO'er many a lengthening league.Let others traverse sea and land,And toil through various climes,I turn the world round with my handReading these poets' rhymes.From them I learn whatever liesBeneath each changing zone,And see, when looking with their eyes,Better than with mine own.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I love the paradise of being between the pages of a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Books are carnival rides for your imagination.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Every book is its own black hole. Don’t fight the pull, find out where it takes you.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

~ Fernando Pessoa

I hold a theory that, sooner or later, if a man but live long enough, certain books destined for his peculiar delight will find him, however obscure they or he may be.

~ Vincent Starrett

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ...

~ W. Somerset Maugham

It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.

~ John Erskine

Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow—“all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained—but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in.

~ Carolina De Robertis

Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.

~ Theodora Goss

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood.

~ E.l. Konigsburg

You'll never get to the happily ever after if you don't move past the current chapter...

~ Carmen Desousa

who gets the rare opportunity of spotting a treasure of memories lying among masses, stepping back to stroke it with a secret smile as your mind wanders back to those sleepless yet ecstatic nights you had spent together?only............a book lover.

~ Nadun Lokuliyanage