Books Reading Quotes

Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives. ~ Alexia Casale

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill

Sometimes when Rose was reading, she would catch a whiff of the musty smell of her book. She put her nose down in the fold and inhaled deeply so that wonderful smell, the smell of adventure in faraway lands, would fill her up. She rubbed her hand across the pages to feel the velvety surface of the paper. When she closed her eyes, her fingertips could even feel the words that were printed there, each letter raised just a little, almost like the special language that her blind aunt Mary could read.
To Rose, a book was as real and alive as if it breathed and walked and spoke. ~ Roger Lea MacBride

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself. ~ Alice Hoffman

Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books. ~ Jasper Fforde

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. ~ Alain De Botton

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time. ~ Katherine Rundell

Ignorance must be prosecuted when arrested. The only way for its arrest is by information and the only way for prosecution is through reading and learning of new things. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. ~ Tony Judt

And books! ... she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. ~ Jane Austen

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others ... ~ Chris Geiger

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books
whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. ~ Cecelia Ahern

When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid. ~ William H Gass

I have a tingly feeling that I get when there are books all around me. The library! I know it's geeky, but I love it. Just sitting between the shelves of books, reading - it's the safest feeling. ~ Nick Lake

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol. ~ Pamela Dean

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies. ~ Andre Maurois

Reading is reading - no matter what the material. ~ Giovanna Fletcher

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it. ~ Katarina Bivald

Fiction was a way for me to escape into another world. I would lose myself and all my shame, insecurity, and fear in those books. I would let time slip away in the pages of other worlds. Reading was a life long gift I grew to cherish. ~ Daniel D. Maurer

Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet. ~ Julie Highmore

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. ~ C.S. Lewis

When I was very young, before I could read, I remember being very interested in comic books. ~ Nathan Fillion

Melancholy isn't a sign of the book's end; it is its inspiration. Melancholy is reading's muse. ~ Andrew Piper

…only then did I wake out of the book. ~ John McGahern

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. ~ Robert Goolrick

Only reading can leave one satisfied at having lived a thousand lives! ~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did - they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn't have your own. ~ Simone St. James

In reading you must pursue to become a creator. ~ Aman Jassal

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends. ~ Victor Hugo

'You're there, but the books draw you in to whole other worlds. I mean, I know you study more serious things than the silly stories I read, but when you're there, you can be anywhere. It fascinates me.' ~ Caethes Faron

For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

The thing about books was, the more you read and liked them, the more you wanted to have on hand to read. Before you knew it you needed more bookshelves, and then all of the sudden they filled your house. ~ Sui Ishida

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. ~ Alberto Manguel

You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you ~ Gabrielle Zevin

They were completely alone on the long stretch of country road and there was no one else to share the moment with them. ~ S.A. Tawks

His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks.
"Required reading," I say.
"It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books. ~ Victoria Schwab

It's only in books--actual printed books--that you can easily start and stop your reading, that you can preread and reread, and, these days, as the book itself suffers from a cluster of plagues, it seems only right to pause and assert that the books that ought to be rescued these days are not the books that require a "spoiler alert"--such books are already spoiled--but books that aren't spoiled even if you know what's going to happen, even if you peek at the end, even if you're reading them for a second, or fifth, or dozenth time. ~ J.C. Hallman

As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness. ~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe. ~ Katarina Bivald

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well ... ~ Michel De Montaigne

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. ~ C.S. Lewis

We profit little by books we do not enjoy. ~ John Lubbock

Beware the man of a single book. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world - a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author's voice resonated in the reader's head with the same words that had resonated in his own as he wrote them. He spoke to the reader from the past. What he had witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered would live forever. You only had to turn a page to travel in time. ~ Stephen Parrish

Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read. ~ Lemony Snicket

Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS ~ Charles Bukowski

Reading stimulates the imagination and a good imagination can change the world in the most splendid of ways. ~ Meredith Wood

Good books makes good life.
Great books makes great life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I guess there are never enough books. ~ John Steinbeck

Reading to me has always been like having a conversation with people who wouldn't ask me any personal questions. Instead, they open up their own hearts and tell their secrets to me. ~ Marina Simcoe

He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn't exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she'd bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She'd never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
Nicole Krauss

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? ~ Karl Kraus

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones ... ~ Colin Meloy

Books make the best ersatz friendships. ~ Nenia Campbell

But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)] ~ William Hazlitt

Home is where you keep your books! ~ Avijeet Das

I rode my bike home and did the one thing that always helped when things weren't going well. I read. Books were my refuge. Getting lost in a solid adventure story was the best way I knew of to turn off reality. ~ D.J. MacHale

I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we're friendly. So there. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was ... that was what I did. I was the kid with the book. ~ Neil Gaiman

I enjoy reading for the sake of reading and my attitude about writing is the same. If a story line required it, I would absolutely write in another genre. ~ Alistair Cross

Reading is like a bridge which fills the gap between the real world and the imaginations. ~ Aman Jassal

Books turn out to be pretty durable if they're kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even thought these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time. ~ C.A. Fletcher

Good aims not always make good books. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints ... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does. ~ Douglas Coupland

Stories are the only things that can ever really change the world. ~ Rowan Coleman

Good books are for consideration after, too. ~ Stephen King

Some swore the cats had been caught pawing through the pages of open books - reading. ~ Sarah J. Maas

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.
For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. ~ Julie Powell

The hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I have my own e-reader, but I hardly ever use it. I need to fold down pages and flag passages with sticky notes. I need to experience books, not just read them. I never go anywhere without a book in my bag, and to travel across the ocean, I'd packed more than my fair share. ~ Lauren Morrill

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life. ~ Anna Quindlen

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion. ~ Ellen Kushner

My big dream was to write. I never thought about movie deals or book awards or bestseller lists. I still don't. All I've ever wanted from this gig is to sell enough books to allow me to keep writing more of them. ~ Alistair Cross

Thousands of Jews in the ghetto came to their library to borrow books. Reading gave both hope and consolation to the inhabitants, as a fifteen-year-old boy, Yitzhak Rudashevski, wrote in his diary on the same day that the library celebrated its hundred thousandth book loan: 'Hundreds of people read in the ghetto. Reading has become the ghetto's greatest pleasure. Books give one a feeling of freedom; books connect us to the world. The loan of the hundred thousandth copy is something the ghetto can be proud of. ~ Anders Rydell

We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits ... so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'tis then we get the right good from the book. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day. ~ Louisa May Alcott

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book
it makes a very poor doorstop. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

I read everyday, because reading takes me away, away to a place where nothing is impossible. ~ Manoj Arora

When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don't keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories. ~ Pamela Paul

I also like to escape inside their world,
tucked behind their colorful spines. It forces me to fully invest
my mind into what I'm doing, not just my ears or my eyes. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

I received her sewing kit and pins and brooches; a blank diary purchased especially for me; "Advice to a Young Married Woman", by a minister, which she asked me not to read till I was older----; "Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions"; "The Whole Duty of Woman"; and some volumes of Walter Scott's novels, which I might enjoy when my reading had improved. With a glance at Rev. Fowler, whose advice she had sought in this matter, she said that, for a sensible girl such as she knew me to be, novels by respectable authors could provide harmless amusement, but I must remember not to neglect my duties for them, not to demand that my life be a romance, or over strain myself with too much reading. ~ Phillip Margulies

READ, READ, KEEP READING. UNTIL YOU KICK THE BUCKET. ~ Onwukwe Chimdinma

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else. ~ John Waters

I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end. ~ Frank Conroy

If a religious book makes you harbor ill thoughts about those with differing faith, then, you're reading the wrong crap of late. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

I think I might have something for you today, he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. ~ Ezra Pound

There's nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument. ~ Stephen King

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty. ~ Doris Lessing

Some men borrow books; some men steal books; and others beg presentation copies from the author. ~ James Jeffrey Roche

There is no other enjoyment like reading ~ Jane Austen

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead ... ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

I have never been able to resist a book about books. ~ Anne Fadiman