Reading Quotes

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

~ The Inkslinger

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

~ Sara Sheridan

Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another.

~ Dean F. Wilson

It’s okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that’s what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet.

~ Jeff Hutchins

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

~ Willie Van Peer

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

~ Mark Haddon

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

~ Stacey T. Hunt

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I read nonfiction.She reared back as if offended.

~ Anne Osterlund

The unification of worlds is an author's priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.

~ Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla

Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […]

~ Pierre Bayard

[…] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.

~ Pierre Bayard

This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

~ Roxane Gay

My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

~ Camille Paglia

You are either in a state of perfection or a state of learning. Reading is one of the best ways to learn about our lives and purpose!

~ Cupideros

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I’ve had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don’t mind saying that they scare me a little.

~ Laurie Penny

Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.

~ Orison Swett Marden

And that is the problem with a society that doesn't read books. The most painful form of censorship does not come from a centralized, repressive government. It is a cast, black cloak of a nation's indifference.

~ Lourd De Veyra

If you read great literature every day, you will uplift your spirit, soul and self.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I believe that life is all about perception and timing. That good things come to those who act and that life’s about more than collecting a paycheck. I believe that the only person you’re destined to become is the one that you decide to be. That if you try hard enough you can convince yourself of anything. That having patience doesn’t make you a hero nor does it make you a doormat. I believe that not showing love proves you’re weak and belittling others doesn’t make you strong. That you are never as far away from people as the miles may suggest. That life’s too short to read awful books, listen to terrible music, or be around uninspiring people. I believe that where you start has little impact on where you finish. That sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away. That you can never be overdressed or overeducated. I believe that the cure for anything is salt water; sweat, tears, or the sea. That you should never let your memories be greater than your dreams. And that you should always choose adventure.

~ Todd Smidt

Was it worth while to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps,measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference—about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

~ Adrienne Rich

If you are reading this, be sure to count this on your blessings list.

~ Anthony Liccione

There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.

~ Thomas Lux

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well.

~ Deanna Vasquez

...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...

~ John Geddes

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

~ Susan Wise Bauer

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompleteness as a person and strove to overcome that.One of the ways in which he did that was by reading. He didn't read much, or too widely, but attentively, looking for instruction, hints for self-improvement, and he read serious books.

~ Pankaj Mishra

The first story to read is the Biblical stories.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading illuminates our path with the brightest light.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I live in paradise within the pages of a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

~ Richard Brookhiser

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Burn the book. It serves you once.Read the book. Serves you for a lifetime.Lend the book. It serves for generations to come.

~ Kowtham Kumar K

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

~ Jamie L. Harding

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry‘til not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper“Read…

~ Chila Woychik

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

~ Verlyn Klinkenborg