
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one.”
Source: A Dance with Dragons. Jojen
Source: Purity of Blood
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one.”
Source: A Dance with Dragons. Jojen
The Triple Thinkers (1938) [Oxford University Press, 1948], Preface, p. ix
“The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.”
Speech in Kansas City (12 May 1905), PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 16:99
Unsourced variant: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
1900s
“It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.”
Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 315
“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 439
“The world is a great book, of which they that never stir from home read only a page.”
Attributed to Augustine in "Select Proverbs of All Nations" (1824) by "Thomas Fielding" (John Wade), p. 216 http://www.archive.org/details/selectproverbsa00wadegoog, and later in the form "The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page", as quoted in 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1995) by Evan Esar, p. 822; this has not been located in Augustine's writings, and may be a variant translation of an expression found in Le Cosmopolite (1753) by Fougeret de Monbron: "The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one's own country."
Misattributed
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.
“Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.”
Source: I Am the Messenger