Quotes about reading

page 13

“I went to college, but I learned to write by reading and writing.”

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

“You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.”

“Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”

“All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

“We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding.”

“Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n.
One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.”

“People who don't read are brutes.”

“The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.”

“May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.”

“Like O'Rielly, we'll grab the most important word of each sentence… 'The' for example. Also, I'll say, 'I'm angry,' and the graphic will read, 'Colbert angry.”

“As I walk back to the school on my own, I realise I'm crying. So I go back to the stories I've read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine.”

“Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”

“What would a racist call werewolves? Wargs? She kind of liked that one, but suspected that racist bastards didn't read Tolkien.”

“[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy… Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.”

“Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn't it?”

“What's your favorite book?
"The last one I read.”

“Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.”

“Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.”

“You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did.”

“If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing.”

“My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.”

“And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside
a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted
to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in
for ever.”

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

“Have read little and understood less.”

“No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about… One thing's for sure—no one but you can be the hero of your story.”

“When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.”

“Read, read, read. That's all I can say.”

“I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.”

“You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.”

“Logos and branding are so important. In a big part of the world, people cannot read French or English--but are great in remembering signs”

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”

“Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.”

“You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.”

“[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”

“I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.”

“I've read your summary."
"And?"
"It's not incompetent."
Be still, my heart, so I don't faint from such faint phrase. "Did you expect it to be written in crayon?”

“Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.”

“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”

“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

“The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”

“There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.”

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.”

“I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”

“In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery.”

“He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.”

“She snatched at the dream that had comforted her for so long. It was faded and thin, like a letter too often read.”

“I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.”

“Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS”

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”

“Close, close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

Close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.”

“I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it.”

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”

“Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”

“Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“A book that one has not read yet is always more exciting than a book one has memorized.”

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all theof that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

“I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.”

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”

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

“If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.”

“I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning… rather than one great dull answer to all our questions”

“What is reading but silent conversation.”

“The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.”

“If privacy had a gravestone it might read: “Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.””

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”

“That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?”

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.”

“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

“Imagination can take you Places…. READ”

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”

“When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.”

“I read my eyes out and can't read half enough. … The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.”

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously…. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

“She wondered if it was her stupid mother, the goddess of love, messing with her thoughts. If Piper started getting urges to read fashion magazines, she was going to have to find Aphrodite and smack her.”

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

“Oh, he's not like that," said Favonius.

Jason flinched. "You can read my mind?"

"I don't need to." Favonius tossed his bronze hoop in the air. "has the wrong impression of Cupid… until they meet him.”

“This must be what an addict feels like, I think,
trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.”

“Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.”

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

“One reads alone, even in another's presence.”

“I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.”

“By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.”

“This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.”

“See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.”

“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”

“The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.”

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”

“Would you mind getting off that fly paper and giving the flies a chance?"
"Ahhh, you can't trick me! Flies don't read papers!”