Life Reading Quotes

Reading is the most important way to prepare for life. ~ Lois Lowry

When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.

Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.

With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.

What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator. ~ Dean F. Wilson

No level raised without reading, is like a body trying to live without breathing. ~ Ilias Oumarri

Reading changes your life, Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters- the saints and sinners, real or imagined- reading shows you how to be a better human being. ~ Donalyn Miller

I've always felt sad for people who don't read fiction; they only get to live one life. ~ Jack Tyler

The end of reading is not more books but more life. ~ Holbrook Jackson

Burn the book. It serves you once.
Read the book. Serves you for a lifetime.
Lend the book. It serves for generations to come. ~ Kowtham Kumar K

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. ~ E. M. Forster

One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional - it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story. ~ Angie Thomas

The word of God is an immense wealth. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Each book has a reader, and each reader has a book. ~ Carmela Dutra

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be. ~ Italo Calvino

When you are working well with your
energy, you are also making the best
expression of your personal power ... By
reading your own energy, by becoming
aware of the lens through which you see
your world, you can change your mind and change your life. ~ Caroline Myss

Reading leads to a lifetime of learning ~ Laura Bullock

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. ~ C.S. Lewis

I would probably have to say that reading fiction - those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I've gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there's always another perspective. ~ Tom Perrotta

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province. ~ Virginia Woolf

Once you start reading the eyes, you need no words! ~ Kalpana Bhandari

Reading is soul work! ~ Gina Smith

Reading is such a huge part of my life. ~ Veronica Roth

I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read
books about people and things that matter, books about life and death. ~ Will Schwalbe

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book. ~ Julian Barnes

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life. ~ Warren Buffett

Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

I have found that reading is much better than a good sleep. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading self-improvement books is like creating a mental savings account from which we can withdraw viable tools for what we perceive as tough days. ~ Dr. Jacent Mpalyenkana, Ph.D. MBA

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don't think I like reality very much. Principally, I don't understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do. ~ Shirley Jackson

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page. ~ Alice Hoffman

I love reading. It gives me somewhere to be, somewhere to be accepted and somewhere to be found. But most of all, it's because I don't want to face reality. And who would? Not me! My life is too miserable and way too depressing. So until it gets better, I am content with trapping myself in my books. Happy? ~ Katy Feng

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;
not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Reading is a huge part of life. ~ Daniel Curtis Lee

Our constant desire to genre-label cripples new writers. Let them experiment, explore and surprise. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I spent so much of my life reading about spirituality and reading about neuroscience and trying different meditation practices. It's a really big part of my life. But it's sometimes hard to talk about. There are so many people in the world who don't live in Southern California and don't spend their time meditating. ~ Moby

Don't you think it's better to continue reading than to just close the book? ~ Rebecca McNutt

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons. I measure mine out in pages. ~ Jen Adams

The stories she'd read of others' lives over these last few months had left her with a greater appreciation for the thread of her own life. ~ Masha Hamilton

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life. ~ Marcus Aurelius

If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do. ~ Clive James

I read 'The Hobbit' only when I was an adult. I had a lot of friends, teenagers, who discovered reading through 'The Hobbit,' but it wasn't something that I discovered until later in life. ~ Matthew Reilly

My alma mater was books, a good library ... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. ~ Malcolm X

Life loiters at the book's first page,
Ah! could we turn the leaf. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race. ~ Aman Jassal

We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning to love reading, we are creating adults (who then become parents and teachers) who don't read much. They may be capable of reading well enough to perform academic and informational reading, but they do not love to read and have few life reading habits to model for children. ~ Donalyn Miller

A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it. ~ Aman Jassal

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered. ~ Stephen King

I am a sandwich man. Somewhere early in life, my epigenetic switches got flicked to 'likes sandwiches,' and that's where they still are. I suspect it's at least in part because they're easy to eat while reading. ~ Tad Williams

There are books that change our perspectives and books that change our personalities. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading. ~ Malorie Blackman

I always looked for a place where I could sit in solace and read, and you know what offered me that comfortable solitude? Books. ~ Neeraj Agnihotri

If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice. ~ Aman Jassal

My new favorite title is How Jane Austen Ruined My Life. I don't have the courage to read it, though. I'm afraid to discover she's ruined mine as well. ~ Katherine Reay

Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk dangers of real life. ~ Heather Christle

I have lived in worlds beyond counting and countries as strange and wonderful as the dance of dust in sunbeams, because I have lived in books. ~ Garon Whited

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. ~ Lin Yutang

What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don't even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don't want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I'll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it. ~ Tarryn Fisher

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents. ~ Sven Birkerts

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction. ~ Alan Furst

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading. ~ Amy Bloom

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are ~ Someone

Good stories never wear out, re-gift a book! ~ Nanette L. Avery

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within. ~ Han Nolan

The zeal to pray and desire to read the scriptures can transform many lives. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. ~ Italo Calvino

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read. ~ Katarina Bivald

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993) ~ Peter F. Drucker

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications. ~ Adrian Tomine

And you never fall behind?"
"Of course I do. But I always feel guilty when that happens. After all, my journal is the oldest and most loyal friend I have. And it never interrupts me when I'm speaking," he added, with a boyish grin. ~ Zack Love

Perhaps this is why one reads fiction to begin with - to live a more interesting reality than one's daily life. ~ Steven Rigolosi

It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill. ~ Gore Vidal

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life. ~ Raymond Carver

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating. ~ Stephenie Meyer

If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it. ~ T.A. Uner

what are inside books may not all that necessarily be different from what are outside books at all ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Dinosaurs didn't read. Look what happened to them! ~ Internet Humor

I've spent my entire life reading about the lives other people are having. My world has been ... very small. No one believes I would thrive if I weren't kept secluded and protected. Like a flower in a glasshouse. If I marry one of my kind, as you put it, no one will ever see me as I am. Only what I'm supposed to be. ~ Lisa Kleypas

College isn't the only answer. Reading is a college that you can and should attend all your life. ~ Paul Mellon

I'm recapitulating ... condensing ... it's the Readers Digest style ... people only have time to read thirty pages ... apparently! ... maximum! ... that's all they have time for! they horse around for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, they sleep, they copulate the rest, where would they find the time to read a hundred pages? oh, do caca, I forgot! as well! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. ~ Saul Bellow

I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark. ~ Joshua Ferris

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life. ~ Katherine Paterson

So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It's time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze. ~ Dan B. Allender

I love fortune readings! because when I get in troubles, if the reading says that I am in a lucky day, I can think my troubles are just some kind of mistakes, and if the reading says that I am in the unlucky day, I can think that my troubles are just because of my bad luck. Either ways, I can know the reason of my troubles. ~ Hiroko Sakai

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't. ~ Carla H. Krueger

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life is a book,
let's start reading it. ~ Samar Sudha

Take a deep breath, open your eyes, and close the book. ~ Gabriel Ba

We find paradise in every library and bookshop. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Everyone wants to be happy and live mindfully. Books teach us how to resuscitate the body and soul and how to recognize what in our own personal lives is worthy of noticing. Writers' considered opinions and subtle observations regarding the joys, paradoxes, pains, tragedies, and truths of living provide us with a jumpstart in analyzing how best to integrate our personal experiences and disjointed thoughts into a cogent belief system. An artistic person understands their passions demand a struggle. Reading allows me unobtrusively to discover how other people freed themselves from suffering a destructive life of attachment, delusion, and disablement. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Books are Apologies from life ~ Kimoya Brown

I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. ~ Scott Corbett

I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it. ~ Mary Karr

Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak. ~ Isabel Gillies

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf. ~ Erri De Luca