Quotes on Reading

Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.

We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding.

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.