Quotes About Reading

At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, "out of a curiosity to see what there was in it." He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus.

Si uno crece en una casa donde hay libros, donde alguien le lee, donde padres, hermanos, tías, tíos y primos leen por placer, es natural que aprenda a leer. Si no hay nadie cerca que disfrute leyendo, ¿dónde está la prueba de que vale la pena?

There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.

One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.

We often speak of creating an environment for reading, a reading climate.

I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us Molly Bloom's soliloquy of yes.

Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of 'form'.

meanings are neither randomly bestowed by readers, nor objectively there on the page in the sense that a watermark is.

You can enjoy books you do not admire and admire books you do not enjoy.

A book is read one page at a time. A shelf is read one book at a time. A library is read one shelf at a time.

They would also read and be read to – silent reading was regarded as highly suspect, a sign of being antisocial or melancholy, suitable only for scholars.

I used to lie on his bed for an hour before bedtime or on a Saturday afternoon and read to him and then when he graduated to books with chapters sometimes he read. I'd look over at him, at his entire body, which appeared to have grown in the last few minutes; his lips moved and his eyes danced and darted across the page and I'd think: my son can read; he can comprehend things, he is making discoveries and he will soon have even more opinions about the world.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.

And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.

So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.

It's a bad case o' the thinkin' he's caught, missus. When a man starts messin' wi' the readin' and the writin' then he'll come doon with a dose o' the thinkin' soon enough. I'll fetch some o' the lads and we'll hold his heid under water until he stops doin' it, 'tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin'.

I dinna trust him, said Slightly Mad Angus. He reads books an' such.

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested.

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

This is no way to treat a book," he said. "Look, he's bent the spine right back. People always do that, they've got no idea of how to treat them.