Reading Quotes

He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

~ Carson Mccullers

So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.

~ Roald Dahl

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

~ Billy Collins

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

~ Mordecai Richler

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

~ Wendy Lesser

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

~ Thomas Love Peacock

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.

~ Lorin Stein

Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

~ Anthony Burgess

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)

~ Rabih Alameddine

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all.” - from “Pageturner” in “365 Tomorrows

~ Joseph Patrick Pascale

A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.

~ Jason Ellis

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

~ Wendy Lesser

Ocean waves gently rock the boat,As if to the tune of a lullaby.She sits still as the boat silently floatsUnder the infinite blue sky.

~ Rachel Lewis

When Mats came in the evenings, they would drink tea in the kitchen while reading their books and talking about them. If Katri came in, they were quiet and waited for her to leave. The back door would close, and Katri would have gone.“Does your sister read our books?” Anna wanted to know.“No. She reads literature.

~ Tove Jansson

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From Pageturner in 365 Tomorrows

~ Joseph Patrick Pascale

A fortress built long ago,Walls made timeless by historic glory.The small girl in the boat slows,To listen to its story.

~ Rachel Lewis

As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.

~ Rachel Lewis

I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.

~ Lillian R. Melendez

The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

~ Jamie L. Harding

Take my books away, and I should be desperate!

~ Emily Brontë

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

~ David Shields

I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

~ James Branch Cabell

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

~ Joshua Rogers

Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.

~ Joshua Rogers

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

~ Anne Carson

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

~ Russell Kirk

She had a grocer's faith in books, they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

~ Pat Conroy

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

~ Harold Bloom

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

~ Italo Calvino

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

~ Tom Spanbauer

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

~ Jeanette Winterson

They were...no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved.

~ Gloria Goldreich

They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth.

~ Gloria Goldreich

I don't fear death--I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.

~ Amy Smith

That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.

~ Sophie Divry

These two oo in book are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

~ Stefanos Livos

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

~ James Salter

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

~ Francine Prose

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

~ John Green