Reading Quotes

Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

[Among the books he chooses, a statesman] ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.

To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root - first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

I spend a lot of time reading.

So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

All the people who fought for freedom were my heroes. I mean, that was the sort of story I liked reading... freedom struggles and so on.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person

Reading... a vacation for the mind.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children's hands early and often.

One reads in order to ask questions

Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Right now I'm singing along to books on tape. I typically pop in something like Stephen King's 'The Stand,' and I love singing along to that kind of stuff.

Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

A room without books is like a life without meaning.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.

Meek young men grow up in libraries.

...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .

I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice.You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

This book is to be read in bed.