Reading Quotes

Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.

~ Andrew Kaufman

A closed book will lie there like a dead horse. But an open book will kick, buck, and bolt through perceived adventures like a wild and free stallion. So hold on.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

~ Mike Carey

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

~ Ben Okri

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

~ Zadie Smith

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

~ Ben Okri

By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.

~ John Mark Reynolds

Past ages come to us in new ways. For instance, they bore or disturb us. The dead say things we would or could not say in ways that appall , bless, and startle us. Reading them is part of diversity. The easiest voices to ignore are those of the dead; nevertheless, they often on the ones we need most.

~ John Mark Reynolds

One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all huma

~ Richard F. Thomas

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems.  It is an escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me. Reading in some wonderful ways helps me find out who I am. When she was a young girl Patricia MacLachlan's mother encouraged her to read a book and find out who you are. And it is true that in some ways reading defines me as it refines me. Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality. I read to feel life.

~ Gladys M. Hunt

He had no ideal world of dead heroes, he knew little of the life of men in the past, he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

~ George Eliot

If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

~ Clive James

Some books are so familiar, reading them is like being home again.

~ Louisa May Alcott

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

News invented the modern world as much as the modern world invented news. Finding out what was going on elsewhere in the world change people's minds about what was possible or tolerable.

~ Lawrence Kleep

Heaven is a warm cat and a good book.

~ Christina Morris

I smiled. “You mean like a psychic imprint? I know your assistant director of the Preternatural Division, and I mean no disrespect, but I never got the feeling you believed in magic as an investigative tool.'From the book 9 Incarnate - Caitlin Diggs Series

~ Gary Starta

When I was very young, before I could read, I remember being very interested in comic books.

~ Nathan Fillion

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

~ Margaret Atwood

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

~ Sara Sheridan

If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people – then the Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.

~ Thomas Munro

Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.

~ Neil Postman

Reading is a source of liberation. Children who are taught to read early on, are commonly taught to communicate in other significant verbal and nonverbal ways.

~ Asa Don Brown

Reading teaches us receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan....And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily.

~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Books,' I say sleepily. 'They don't change either. If you read a book and look at it again later on, it's still the same thing. But it's exciting all over again.

~ Truus Matti

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

~ Jodi Picoult

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

~ Annie Dillard

Write and people will come to read. Write and people will heed to your words and share them with others. Not all may relate, but wait, and those who were meant to see it eventually will find it, for truth waits to be found. It searches for no one.

~ Suzy Kassem

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

~ Don Roff

For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL

~ Michelle M. Pillow

Every artist was first an amateur.

~ Hafiz

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

~ Italo Calvino

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

~ Orhan Pamuk

The aging Adams delightedly describes being surrounded by books on so many different subjects that interested him as baits on fishhooks.

~ Paul C. Nagel

A student will find that he is more affected by one book which he has truly mastered than by 20 books which he has merely skimmed.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

~ Johnny Rich

If you aren't polite when giving criticism you will come off as an awful person and if you aren't polite when receiving criticism you will come off as an awful person.

~ S.a. Tawks

The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell.

~ S.a. Tawks

They were completely alone on the long stretch of country road and there was no one else to share the moment with them.

~ S.a. Tawks