Quotes on Reading

Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.

There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.

Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.

The very practice of reading [the Bible] will have a purifying effect upon your mind and heart. Let nothing take the place of this daily exercise.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Writing should be meaningful for children, Y an intrinsic need should be aroused in them, and Y writing should be incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant.

A new book is like a friend that I have yet to meet

[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.