Quotes on Reading Books

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

Learning is acquired by reading books; much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights