Reading Quotes

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye sees the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and remembers what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically flinch. Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.

~ David Mitchell

Once he'd asked, Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room.She had laughed and said, I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Everybody loves to hate a sinner, reading stories about them makes people feel better about themselves.

~ Tycobbsteeth

Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.

~ Carmen Desousa

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

~ Novalis

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.

~ Lemony Snicket

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.

~ Barack Obama

I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.

~ Konstantinos Staikos

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

~ David Mamet

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

~ Robert Arger

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

~ Rawi Hage

She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next day at work. But still she'd sneak away for lunchtime trysts, her eager fingers fumbling for the bookmark.

~ Cath Staincliffe

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

~ Gustave Flaubert

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

~ Jane Austen

It's not what you will get out of the books that is so enriching — it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life.

~ Robin S. Sharma

So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.

~ Johnny Rich

A lexicographer a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge.

~ Samuel Johnson

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

~ Richard De Bury

Books are the most mannerly of companions accessible at all times in all moods frankly declaring the author's mind without offense.

~ Amos Bronson Alcott

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

~ Aldous Huxley

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

~ John He Carri

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.

~ Arthur Balfour

If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on appreciation causes you to linger.

~ William Gerhardie

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book.

~ Walter Sickert

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

~ W. H. Auden

The delight of opening a new pursuit or a new course of reading imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

~ Bob Macaulay

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing the whole point is knowing what to read.

~ Jacques Ellul

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

~ Anthony Trollope

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

~ Anthony Burgess

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language not set its style.

~ Phillip Babcock Gove

To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.

~ Robert Burchfield

What is reading but silent conversation?

~ Walter Savage Landor

'Sartor Resartus' is simply unreadable and for me that always sort of spoils a book.

~ Harry S. Truman

You should read it though there is much that is skip-worthy.

~ Herbert Asquith

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

~ Jean Cocteau