Reading Quotes

We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.

~ Isabel Allende

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.

~ George Orwell

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.

~ Katarina Bivald

How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes.These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...

~ Boris Pasternak

I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption--vain because it is endless--and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.

~ Lydia Davis

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book. Also, when I write letters, I spend the next two days thinking about what I figured out in my letters.

~ Stephen Chbosky

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

~ Henry David Thoreau

at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

~ Lisel Mueller

With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua’s hands. “One of my favorites.

~ C.j. Milbrandt

...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went...

~ Elena Ferrante

Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.

~ Kira Hawke

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. ”― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

~ Haruki Murakami

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.

~ James Weldon Johnson

I think I'm going through a bit of ADD. I'm reading 3 books simultaneously and it's something that I don't recommend. It's like watching TV with two others who keep changing the channels...

~ S.j. Romero

Begin to read.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The survival spirit, either read or write a story.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.

~ Joe Hill

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.

~ Katarina Bivald

There's always a person for every book. And a book for every person.

~ Katarina Bivald

Some books are so special that you never forget where you were the first time you read them.

~ Natalie Lloyd

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…

~ Italo Calvino

Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.

~ Dan Groat

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.

~ Katarina Bivald

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

~ Harold Bloom

We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

~ Sergio Troncoso

I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.

~ Isabel Allende

Encourage your children to read more and watch television less.

~ Gordon B. Hinckley

A book was mere paper splattered with ink until a reader’s mind gave it life.

~ Elizabeth Langston

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

~ Harold Bloom

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

~ Harold Bloom

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

~ Sarah Vowell

People experience books so very differently.

~ Amy Neftzger

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

~ Patti Smith

It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.

~ Jen Selinsky

President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.

~ Harold Holzer

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

~ Dan Groat

What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

~ Tim Parks