Quotes about reading
page 8

“Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze — and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence.”

Spider Robinson book Variable Star

Source: Variable Star

Men, Learning

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

Source: The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History

Truth

“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?”

Cornelia Funke (1958) author

Personality

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

Anne Tyler (1941) American novelist

Life

“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.”

Craig Nelson (1971) Scottish footballer

Source: Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations

Books

“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.”

Sarah Vowell The Wordy Shipmates

Source: The Wordy Shipmates

“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.”

Elizabeth Peters The Falcon at the Portal

Source: The Falcon at the Portal

Kiss, Cry

“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.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

People, Books, Thinking

“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.”

Sei Shonagon book The Pillow Book

Source: The Pillow Book

Disappointment

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

Charlaine Harris book Dead Reckoning

Source: Dead Reckoning

Happiness

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

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“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.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Books, Imagination, Time

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

History

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

Jonathan Franzen book How to Be Alone

Source: 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.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

Source: ABC of Reading

Books, Understanding

“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.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Mood, Thinking

“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.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Grip of the Shadow Plague

Books, Hurt

“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.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: A History of Reading

Children, Books, Feeling, Game

“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.”

Lewis Buzbee (1957) American writer

Source: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

Books, Age

“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.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: Violet & Claire

Flowers, Lovers, Dance, Housing

“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.”

James Salter (1925–2015) American novelist and short-story writer

Source: All That Is

People, Pleasure, Food, Music

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

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Books

“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.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Source: I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

Books, History, Literature, Thinking

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

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

A Little Girl Lost, st. 1
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Love, Children, Age, Time

“To my son,

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

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Dead

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

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Books, Forgetting

“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,”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1930s, Wisehart interview (1930)
Context: 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, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

Age, 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”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Hope, Change

“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”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Life, Thinking, Time, Dead

“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.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

Lightsong the Bold
Warbreaker (2009)

Books

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

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Books

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Thinking, Learning

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

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ink and Bone

Men, Books, Past

“… 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.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Books, Time

“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”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Death, Soul, Thinking, Time

“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.”

Francine Prose (1947) American writer

Source: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Books, Feeling, Imagination

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

Agatha Christie Elephants Can Remember

Source: Elephants Can Remember

Happiness, People

“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.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Truth, Books, Color, Season

“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.”

Allan Bloom book The Closing of the American Mind

Source: The Closing of the American Mind

Books, Failure

“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.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

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

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 177

People, 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.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Jesting Pilate

Life, Money, Way

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

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God

“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.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Source: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

Love, Hate, Books, Dead

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

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Love, People

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

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Love

“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.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Books, Thinking, Time

“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.”

Jane Smiley (1949) American novelist

Source: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Life

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

Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) American writer

World, Forgetting

“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.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Books, Night

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

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

Books

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

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Madness

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

Jorge Luis Borges book The Library of Babel

Source: The Library of Babel

Understanding

“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?”

Anne Rice book The Queen of the Damned

Source: The Queen of the Damned

“[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.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“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”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Drink

“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.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Books, Dreams, Soul, Personality

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

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Books

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

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Matagorda/The First Fast Draw

Books, Parting

“I reads every chance I can gets.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Chance

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

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Books

“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.”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

People

“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”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Life, People, Books, Personality

“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.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

Source: My Miscellanies

People, Time

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

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Shadow Souls

Help

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

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Books

“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.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Books, Youth, Age, Light

“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.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: After the Quake

Friendship

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

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Books

“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.”

Max Barry book Machine Man

Source: Machine Man

Love, Money, Happiness, Health

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

Brandon Sanderson Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Books

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Thinking

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

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Books

“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.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Books, Way

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

Nicholson Baker book The Anthologist

Source: The Anthologist

World, Thinking

“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.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

History, Tree, Memory, Weather

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

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

Books

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

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

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

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Way

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

Nicholas Sparks book The Lucky One

Source: The Lucky One

Smile

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

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) British writer

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

Joseph Delaney (1945) British writer

Source: Night of the Soul Stealer

Books, Time

“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.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

World, Painting

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

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Thinking, Study

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

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

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

David Markson (1927–2010) American writer

Sex, Learning

“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.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

People, Books, Time

“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.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

People

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

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

War, Peace, Speed

“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.”

Rob Thurman (1950) American writer

Life, People

“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.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 55
Variant: Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

Books, Light

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

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

“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!”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Variant: Leo 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!
Source: The Demigod Diaries

Change, Time, Christmas

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

Mark Haddon (1962) English writer and illustrator

Books