Reading Quotes

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

The biggest thing I did was that I used to go to the library. I fed my mind every day.

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look

If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing.

Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.

Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

We read to know we are not alone.

There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids!

Reading put perspective to any challenge I was facing and made me see that extraordinary people usually had extraordinary pain, difficulties or injustices. That's part of why they have the drive and hunger to do good in the world, to make something happen.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.

Tolle, lege: take up and read.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Read. Travel. Read. Ask. Read. Learn. Read. Connect. Read.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

My encouragement to you is to go tomorrow to the library.

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

Pity the man who has a favorite restaurant, but not a favorite author.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she'd checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.

Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.

Let us read, and let us dance — these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

It is a tie between men to have read the same book.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.

In a magazine, one can get - from cover to cover - 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

I like books that are fat and full.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,--epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?" "The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.

... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.

I have to say that my kids, like every child in America, is completely absorbed with Harry Potter. And so, I have gotten sucked into it, too; I can't wait for the next one to come out. I am trying to figure out what happens with Harry and Voldemort. So we have been reading that.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.