Quotes About Reading

Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.

I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.

Mary Pope Osborne

Reading is the passport for countless adventures

One morning Diana came to work with a Barbara Cartland romance novel tucked under her arm. Coincidentally, Ms. Cartland was the mother of the Earl of Spencer's second wife, Raine, whom I was to learn years later in the press the Spencer children had detested at first. I hoped that novel did not represent Diana's only reading interests.

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

No leía, como hacen muchos, meramente para pasar el rato, sino que seguía interrogándose a sí misma y al autor, modelando cada idea de mil maneras, deseosa de descubrir una verdad en cada frase.

Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book.

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

In the ideal public library, we are all readers of the "middling sort." Reading whatever we will, we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright. Assaults on that birthright in the forms of legislation, surveillance, and censorship ultimately are precisely as dangerous as our acquiescence in them.

If you take a book into your hands, be it 'God's book, or any other useful good book,' rely on God to make it profitable to you. Do not waste time reading unprofitable books. When you read, do so not out of vain curiosity but with love for God's kingdom, compassion for human beings, and the intent to turn what you learn into prayers and praises.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.

I'm a smeller of books and a marker-upper of books.

that bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers.

On one of these gatherings, a guest speaker informed us that in 30 years, no one in America except the homeschoolers would know how to read or write. 

Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.

Quote of the Day-April 25, 2016 "She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.

She did bring home books from the library, in armloads, replenishing them every two or three days. She read avidly, indiscriminately, using them as an antidote for the pain in her heart. But they didn't help much. There was no one to talk them over with.