Reading Books Quotes

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

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

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

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

You can't keep living without breathing; don't keep living without reading! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it ~ James Bryce

I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while. ~ Becky Watson

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

And there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read. ~ Will Schwalbe

As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the ... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading. ~ Marie Clay

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

Words are very powerful. They live on forever and they can be shared again and again. Each one of us may find something different within them, but they have the power to truly guide us and impact us in our lives. ~ Amy Koto

And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it - the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for.
Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, 'Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don't allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value. ~ Paul Torday

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

Of course I do. I've seen you upstairs every day, checking out book after book. You stay here reading long after every other student has gone home. If there's one thing I know, it's that someone who loves reading as much as you do can never be stopped. No matter where you go, you'll have whole worlds in your head. No matter how hard life gets, you'll have whole people's lives worth of experience tucked away inside you. No matter how hard the world tries to silence you, there are millions and millions of words just waiting to burst from you. ~ Sara Wolf

The Genius Of The Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they wil ~ Charles Bukowski

i really like reading books ~ Dale Carnegie

They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnoti[z]ed by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keep them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink-
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
It rots the senses in the head!
It kills imagination dead!
It clogs and clutters up the mind!
It makes a child so dull and blind
He can no longer understand
A fantasy, a fairyland!
His brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His powers of thinking rust and freeze!
He cannot think-he only sees!
'All right' you'll cry. 'All right' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
They... used ... to... read! They'd read and read,
And read and read, and then proceed
To read some more, Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!...
Oh books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw ~ Roald Dahl

Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. ~ Marcel Proust

Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can't think for themselves - But when one has made up one's opinions, there is no use in reading. ~ Maria Edgeworth

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

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow. ~ Spencer Gordon

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

In my desperation to try to lull myself into a gentle sloom, I have created a list of things that will often assist my descent into delicious treacle-sleep. The list includes a series of things I can do if I go to bed and wake up early, and includes things like playing games and reading books, but one item that continually seems to work is telling myself:

The faster I go to sleep, the faster I can have cookies for breakfast.

This idea might seem rudimentary, but it staves off the sulks long enough that I can find a few hours of sleep, even on the hottest of days. If only Biscuit Power worked for other insomniacs, cookies might save humanity from itself. ~ Michelle Franklin

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time ... and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much. ~ Douglas Coupland

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading
I like reading books in the bulk. ~ Virginia Woolf

I was born in Japan and raised in Japan, but those are the only things that make me Japanese, I've grown up reading books from all over. ~ Hideo Kojima

( ... ) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain. ~ Terry Pratchett

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

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

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. ~ Anne Fadiman

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

The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the materials of his work, during reading separates out again the unformed and the formed aspects of the book - and if the reader were to work through the book according to his own idea, a second reader would refine it still more, with the result that, since the mass that had been worked through would constantly be poured into fresh vessels, the mass would finally become an essential component - a part of the active spirit.

Through impartial rereading of his book the author can refine his book himself. With strangers the particular character is usually lost, because the talent of fully entering into another person's idea is so rare. Often even in the author himself. It is not a sign of superior education and greater powers to justifiably find fault with a book. When receiving new impressions, greater sharpness of mind is quite natural. ~ Novalis

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted. ~ Anna Brackett

Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading. ~ Ramakrishna

She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover. ~ Wendy Wax

Books are the one luxury I deem a necessity. If my purchases lead us into poverty, then at least we will be well-read paupers. ~ Mark Brownlow

The Need to Read
"Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life's questions, big and small. ~ Will Schwalbe

I find joy in reading. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

It wasn't until I started writing that I found a whole new appreciation for reading. ~ Justin Bienvenue

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing. ~ David S.E. Zapanta

We need to repent of our sin for not loving our children. Spend some time in repentance and read God's Word and reading books about motherhood. You may be depleted and need fresh vision and perspective in regards to your role as a mom. Find a way to be alone for a few hours and study God's Word as your role as a mother. If you are not enjoying your children if you're lacking joy as a mother may I appeal to you to take whatever measures necessary to change. Repent and find a mature woman who enjoys her role as a mother to encourage you and hold you accountable to this period of your life. ~ Carolyn Mahaney

Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. 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 are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality. ~ Cecelia Ahern

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading. ~ Margaret Atwood

I want to be with my wife. Sitting on a deckchair, sipping some tea, and reading books in a retirement home, in a beautiful and warm place. I'm a romantic guy. ~ Robert Pattinson

Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS ~ Charles Bukowski

My purpose is to create a mirror for the reader to see themselves, to create a light for people to see themselves in the characters, pictures, and stories. So they resonate. ~ Kadir Nelson

He who doesn't see the essence of books shall surely be ruled by those who find and value the real essence of books. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers. ~ James Earl Jones

Reading books allows for the fecundity of imagination. ~ Yours Truly

Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore. ~ Ben Carson

No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music is permitted at all times. No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com,10 etc.). No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening. No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction11 pleasure reading prior to bed. No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have. ~ Timothy Ferriss

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people. ~ Charles Bukowski

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 was not a comic book reader, but my son is. My son wasn't really interested in reading books, which was hard for me because I love to read. It just didn't come naturally to my boy. So we kind of found comic books because they were fascinating to him. They were great stories. ~ Virginia Madsen

I'm a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects. ~ Larry McMurtry

This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

You know what's sad about reading books? It's that you fall in love with the characters. They grow on you. And as you read, you start to feel what they feel - all of them - you become them. And when you're done, you're never the same. Sure you're still you, you look the same, talk in the same manner, but something in you has changed. Something in the way you think, the way you choose, sometimes, even the things you say may differ. But it all comes down to the state you go to after a nice novel. The after-feeling. It's amazing, but somehow, you feel left alone by that world you were once in. It's overwhelming. But it makes you sad. Cause for once you were this, this otherworldly being in ... Neverwhere, and then you suddenly have to say goodbye after a few weeks from when you read the last page. When you've recovered from that state it's just ... quite sad. ~ Suzanne Collins

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things. ~ Joseph Joubert

Writers allow us to see ourselves more clearly, they express spiritual signposts that assist us find ourselves. Writers' self-revelations allow us to grasp personal reflections that remain unrealized and indistinct within ourselves. Nuggets of personal perception remain veiled, until we read carefully chosen words sharing the author's crystallized perceptions. Provocative authors resolutely tap into that robust vein of common yearning and assiduously engineer their way through humankind's rampant library of collective neurosis. Reading a master's scintillating prose allows our own inchoate thoughts to shape up under the splendid beam of sunlight that they cast onto pages bearing their soul's freshly minted words. Their astutely crafted pages conveying everlasting imagery immunizes their work from the harshness of time's relentless march forward. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

...and even now I still can't "do" a real conversation. I have no problem reading books aloud and singing, but as soon as I try to speak with someone, my words just vanish. ~ Naoki Higashida

Books can kill you, while you are reading. ~ Deyth Banger

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I don't think kids have a problem reading books meant for adults; the problem is on the other side of the fence, a misconception of what one kind of literature is 'supposed' to be, perceived to be, as opposed to another: if it's for kids, it can't be any good; it's got to have been dumbed down and/or sweetened up. ~ Kathe Koja

Some books leave us free and some books make us free. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are improved by reading books not by owning them. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

They say she was once a grand lady and lived on the hill. But she took to reading books and went from bad to worse. Stuffed her head full of ideas, and now she's a bit addled. ~ Helen Deutsch

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. ~ Thom Gunn

A book may be regarded as irrelevant until it's relevance, importance and purpose is discovered through reading ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone. ~ Shannon Celebi

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter. ~ Paxton Hood

When you're younger and you see something that really speaks to you, it's indelible in a way that's not the same as when you're an adult. So I'll always love reading books and making movies that resonate with young people. ~ Nina Jacobson

With frightening suddenness he now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket.
Matilda froze in horror. The father kept going. There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn't? How dare she? ~ Roald Dahl

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

And because the world is too big and time is too short and you only have one life to live, read! ~ A.A. Patawaran

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything. ~ William Hazlitt

Time spent reading a book, even a bad one, is never wasted. ~ Stewart Stafford

God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read... centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. Yet I know that back at the house there is my room, full of my presence. There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I'm lost. ~ Sylvia Plath

I spent my entire time reading books and going to the cinema, just to escape. ~ Michael Caine

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

Reading books about enlightenment does not make you enlightened at all. You have to meditate yourself. ~ Frederick Lenz

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

Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased. ~ Virginia Woolf

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book. ~ Lemony Snicket

There is no other enjoyment like reading ~ Jane Austen

That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there. ~ David Amram

I tried to get into comics initially after I graduated Clemson in 1994. I spent a year trying to get in, and I quit reading books because not getting in made me sad. ~ Jonathan Hickman

One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs. ~ Mary Roach

I like reading books that provide you with knowledge that you previously didn't have. And books you have a chance to grow as a human being after reading them. ~ Megan Fox

This book is a treasure; I did not suspect it would be so good when I picked it up, but now I can feel the printed words seeping through my skin and into my veins, rushing to my heart and marking it forever.
I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again. ~ Laura Nowlin

I always seem to be reading several books at once. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?
"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while. ~ John Green

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. ~ George R R Martin

She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading. ~ Lauren Groff

The more books you read, the less topics you have in common with most of the people, that´s the price you pay for reading. ~ Martina Tutková

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