Quotes About Reading

Reading's the means by which the lowest man can lift himself from a state of ignorance.

Significantly, in Luke 4:18-19...the Lord reads from the Isaiah scroll, but stops at 61:2a ("the acceptable year of the Lord"), and omits 61:2b ("the day of vengeance of our God").

I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.

If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly learned, but may be little knowing.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in. Those who have read of every thing are thought to understand every thing too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Nothing was off-limits, nothing was deemed "too adult," and nothing took precedence over reading; it was considered the holiest activity a person could engage in.

One is never too young for fine literature . . .

nothing took precedence over reading; it was considered the holiest activity a person could engage in.

Whereas once Marguerite had been obsessed with food- with heirloom tomatoes and lamb shanks and farmhouse cheeses, and fish still flopping on the counter, and eggs and chocolate and black truffles and foie gras and rare white nectarines- now the only thing that gave her genuine pleasure was reading.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book And calculating profits - so much help By so much rending. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth - 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Did you ever read Bulwer's 'Eva, or the Unhappy Marriage'?

For the last week I have not been at all well, and indeed was obliged yesterday to go to bed after breakfast instead of after tea, where I contrived to abstract myself out of a good deal of pain into Lord Byron's Life by Moore. To-day this abstraction is not necessary; I am much better; and, indeed, little remains of the indisposition but the vulgar fractions of a cough and cold.

It is well worth reading, and worth wondering over. D'Israeli, who is a man of genius, has written, nevertheless, books which will live longer, and move deeper. But everybody should read 'Coningsby.' It is a sign of the times.

And then people ask me what I mean in [words torn out]. I hope you were among the six who understood or half understood my 'Poet's Vow' — that is, if you read it at all. Uncle Hedley made a long pause at the first part. But I have been reading, too, Sheridan Knowles's play of the 'Wreckers.' It is full of passion and pathos, and made me shed a great many tears.

Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly — oh certainly — he does not in a general way appreciate our French people quite with our warmth; he takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won't listen to a story for a story's sake.

He held the book close to his face, open, cupped in the palm of his hands, inhaling the oak-leaf scent of the pages.

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Wooed by a vivid cover, she picked one up and leafed through it. She loved thee way it smelled, the ink, the fine paper, the oversized photographs.

The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.