Quotes About Reading

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

Most of what makes a book good is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

The premodern world directed us to read so little because it was obsessed by a question modernity likes to dodge: what is the point of reading?

Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of actions. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.

Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?" "I beg your pardon, ma'am?" "In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It's not laid down, is it? It's not off-limits?" "Not that I'm aware, ma'am." "Good. Well in that case I'm going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight." The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing.

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers. Scripps: No. Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

She'd never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people.

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

Stava scoprendo che un libro tira l'altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano sempre troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto.

Aamulla kuningattarella oli vähän nuhaa, ja koska sovittuja tapaamisia ei ollut, hän sanoi olevansa ehkä vilustunut ja jäi vuoteeseen. Se ei ollut hänelle tyypillistä eikä myöskään totta, hän sanoi sen oikeastaan vains siksi että saisi jatkaa lukemista.

But ma'am must have been briefed, surely?' 'Of course,' said the Queen, 'but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Books are wonderful, aren't they?' she said to the vice-chancellor who concurred. 'At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak,' she said, 'they tenderise one.