Quotes on Reading

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

A finished person is a boring person.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

As parents, the most important thing we can do _x000D_ is read to our children early and often. Reading _x000D_ is the path to success in school and life. When _x000D_ children learn to love books, they learn to love _x000D_ learning.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives