Quotes about reading

page 8

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”

“When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.”

“Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.”

“Nefret had always had an uncanny ability to read his thoughts. 'Did she cry?' she asked sweetly. 'And then you kissed her? You shouldn't have done that. I'm sure you meant well, but kissing someone out of pity is always a mistake.”

“When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.”

“Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.”

“We might be on the same page, but I wasn't happy about reading it.”

“… but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.”

“Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.”

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

“Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.”

“She wanted letters. Real letters written in his handwriting on actual paper that she could hold and keep and read whenever the mood struck her. They were proof, solid and tangible, that someone was thinking about her.”

“Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment."

Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?"

"I bet you'll tell me."

" 'If you're reading this, you are one.' "

You're a riot.”

“I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.”

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

“She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs – pansies and rosemary – and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook pasta and read poetry aloud.”

“He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.”

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

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

“Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.”

“To my son,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead.”

“Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read.”

“Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking,”

“I hope everyone that is reading this is having a really good day. And if you are not, just know that in every new minute that passes you have an opportunity to change that”

“So you drive as far as you can, even when you can clearly read the sign. You want to think you are exempt, that it doesn’t apply to you. But it does. Life is still a dead end. And we still have a hard time believing it”

“I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you're not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.”

“The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.”

“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”

“I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.”

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.”

“… the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.”

“He [Death] pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death tapped the screen a few times and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reading souls”

“I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.”

“She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

“A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.”

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.”

“Believing everything she read
In the daily news,
(No in-between to choose)
She thought that only
One side won,
Not that BOTH
Might lose.”

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”

“Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”

“God has a prepared path for us to follow. We just have to read the omens he has left for us.”

“Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

“I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.”

“A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.”

“When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.”

“I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

“Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?”

“[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

“Goodbye, Papa, you saved me. You taught me to read. No one can play like you. I'll never drink champagne. No one can play like you."
-Liesel”

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.”

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”

“I reads every chance I can gets.”

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”

“I’ve read that one out of twenty-four people is a sociopath, and if you ask me, the other twenty-three of you should be worried.”

“My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind”

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

“There's nothing to read into. I'm just here to collect my beloved Damon and Stefan is just helping me.”

“Books are for reading, not for turning oneself into livestock.”

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”

“It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not read friendship.”

“wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”

“I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two… But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.”

“If you are anything like me --- Clever, fond of goat cheese, and devilishly handsome --- then you have undoubtedly read many books.”

“The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.”

“skulduggery pleasant is the best book I've ever read and has enspired myself to become an author.”

“He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”

“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”

“It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.”

“Most rats read. Our frustration is, we cannot hold a pen to write.”

“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”

“As Logan walked towards her, he smiled as if reading her mind and opened his arms.”

“I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.”

“You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.”

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.”

“You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you”

“I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

“You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.”

“Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.”

“It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.”

“I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

“I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.”

“Lei had recently discovered how to change the display, like the Times Square JumboTron, so now the banner read: Merry Christmas! All your presents belong to Leo!”

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”

“Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.”

“When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

“Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.”

“I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.”