Reading Quotes

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!

~ Michelle Cuevas

Be calm. Keep reading.

~ Tom Cardamone

If you are brave, you will open the book and read it.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.

~ Kellyn Roth

I read nonfiction for information, fiction for truth.

~ Michael M. Thomas

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

~ Oscar Wilde

I just prefer my fiction with more teeth.

~ Jessica Halleck

In a way, the books were protection. An escape she would always have access to.A sanctuary, there for when she needed it.

~ C.m. Spivey

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

~ Italo Calvino

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

~ Harold Bloom

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, How could I have lived without reading it! and also, What a pity I did not read it in my youth! Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

~ Italo Calvino

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

~ John Leonard

The arts are the best Time Machine we have. C. S. Lewis

~ Philip Zaleski

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

~ John Mole

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

~ Harold Bloom

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

~ Jincy Willett

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Greatest companion is found in reading great books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I know the mind of ancient souls by reading ancient books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I can understand now 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 in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.

~ Cecelia Ahern

Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.

~ Roxane Gay

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.

~ C.s. Lewis

The better the school library, the higher the reading scores.

~ Stephen D. Krashen

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

~ John Ruskin

Cats and books are my universe. Both are infinitely fascinating and full of mystery.

~ Rai Aren

I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.

~ Nick Hornby

She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.

~ Robin Hobb

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.

~ Nova Ren Suma

It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

~ Karina Cooper

For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

~ Diane Setterfield

The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

~ A.d. Posey

Library science was the foundation of all sciences.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.

~ Kira Hawke

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

~ A.d. Posey

Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.

~ A.d. Posey

There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold.

~ Alexandr Iscenco

The treasures in my house are books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading sparks writing.

~ A.d. Posey