Reading Quotes

... a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter’s cursive writing.

~ T.k. Naliaka

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

~ Donalyn Miller

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

~ Louis L'amour

There are hard days to live. And sometimes they will be just a few, and sometimes they will seem endless. And eventually you'll come to understand that we've all been there before - or more than likely are going there now. And maybe that idea will make it easier for you, and maybe it won't. But there will still be hard days to live, and you will still have to find your way through them.

~ Carew Papritz

I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.

~ Harper Lee

Some like to sleep. Some like to read late into the night without catching a wink. In a world of dreamers, both are essential.

~ Amanda Joy Bruns

If I couldn't sleep, I could read.

~ Gail Carson Levine

Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

~ Malcolm X

We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.

~ John Green

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

~ Daniel Pennac

And then, as I got older,I left the woods and lookedat fading stars, dying stars,eternal stars in their heavens,with lips that would kiss and wordsshaped through love songs,a life of journeys to some placefar from home, unfamiliar,(a wild weird western shore)until sunset across limestoneprompts us to make these,our plagiarised prayersto broken stone.

~ Miriam Joy

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

~ Criss Jami

Read to lead in order to succeed.

~ Habeeb Akande

Reading might be the root of ideas and inventions, even in the case of leisure reading.

~ Eraldo Banovac

Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.

~ Robert Greene

We like to take credit when we get a new idea, as if we originated the idea in our brain, but what we actually did was no less extraordinary: we channeled the idea.

~ Chris Prentiss

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.

~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

I was a lazy reader as a kid. One nutrition label on a box of Cap’n Crunch and I’d have to take a nap.

~ M.j. Mcguire

Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.

~ Richard Brookhiser

Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.

~ Gregory Of Nyssa

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

~ Sara Sheridan

No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.

~ Burton Rascoe

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

~ Sara Sheridan

To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.

~ Ellen Gilchrist

I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.

~ M.t. Anderson

These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.

~ Mike Schmoker

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

~ Harold Bloom

Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its neces­sities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because some­times it’s all too much, and we don’t have the resilience we need to survive it. When we’re six, we make best friends easily. When we’re fifty, we don’t. That’s age and expe­rience for you.But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we’re still young and open. Even so, it’s not as simple. Because we’re not as simple.(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post)

~ Michelle Sagara

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

~ Doris Lessing

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

~ Geoff Ryman

... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

~ John Green

If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

~ Bill Hybels

I love books. I love that moment when you can open one and sink into it. You can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting than yours will ever be.

~ Elizabeth Scott

A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task !

~ Syed Arshad

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

~ Glen Duncan