Reading Quotes

And no matter what anybody says, I don't believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I'm concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to read.

~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

You should've thought of that before becoming a fir

~ Ray Bradbury

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.

~ Hafiz

Anyone who doesn't read must be horribly stupid.

~ Bella

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

He blamed television, movies, and books for his love of ghosts. It was a fascination that’s been with him since his youth. He always loved watching or reading anything that had to do with ghosts and haunted locations, especially historic sites like New Orleans, Salem, Tombstone, Gettysburg, and Old San Juan.

~ Jason Medina

You don't just read a book to find adventure. You read a book to find yourself.

~ C.e. Dimond

...there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that Relapse is part of recovery. It's another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery.

~ Chris Prentiss

To long to read.

~ A. Cretan

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

~ E.m. Delafield

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

~ Antony Sher

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

~ Victor Hugo

The best gift you can give me is a book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

~ Matthew Selwyn

A great book is one, which really don’t finish when it finishes.

~ Aman Jassal

Don't read a book to let the time pass...let the time pass to read a book.

~ Nicholaa Spencer

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.

~ Tahereh Mafi

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

~ Julian Barnes

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Want to get your kids to read more? Try making books easily accessible. Put them where kids can easily reach and don't make them off limits. (within reason)

~ Melanie Kirk

Growing up, my parents managed to show me the importance of reading without cramming it down my throat. A difficult task, I'm sure. It breaks my heart to think that there are kids out there, ready to have their imaginations lit on fire, excited and wanting to read, and facing naked shelves in their school or local libraries. Rather than complain or wait till the system stops failing our nation's children this is a matter I feel we must take into our own hands. There are children, right now, waiting-wanting to read. What shall we tell them>

~ Nathan Fillion

Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.

~ Haruki Murakami

the code of a world he'd never been invited to join.

~ Andrew Kaufman

Read a different Africa. Love a vibrant Africa.

~ Kiru Taye

If winter helps you curl up and more that makes it one of the best of the seasons.

~ Murray Pura

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

~ A.s. Byatt

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside.

~ Karen Armstrong

Librarians were like guardian angels, with graying hair and beady eyes, magnified through reading glasses, and always read to recommend new literary windows to gaze through.

~ Ellen Hopkins

A library, no matter how big or small, is a careful balance of love and responsibility. A machine, if you will, cranked by those who care most about reading.

~ Kimberly Karalius

I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.

~ Sergio Troncoso

For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don't read, the loss of a library is a tragedy hat might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading-or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life.

~ Michael Moore

He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

~ Terry Pratchett

He pointed the scepter around the library and had an instant input of all of the books that were there into his brain, as if he had read them all at once.

~ Kaza Kingsley

Once upon a time in a basement library nook,I stumbled upon my first favorite book.Pulled into adventure as the pages unfurled,I found treasures greater than gold or pearls.

~ Tyrean Martinson

I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.

~ Alain Resnais

Everybody comes to the library naked. That's why they come here - to dress themselves in books.

~ Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

~ Michael Moorcock

I will tell everyone I know to come [to the library]. This place saves lives.

~ Gina Sheridan

I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said, 'Mommy, I think we hurt the book!

~ Gina Sheridan