Quotes About Reading

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives.

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...

Caution: psychiatrists. There are hundreds of psychiatrists in this story, and each of them has a catchphrase they repeat over and over. Reading this story will make you hate psychiatrists, even if you are a psychiatrist.

she was five years old and got her first library card, which to a bookish little girl was like a religious experience.

In the coming years the enslaved child, by then a man, would quote Auld's words often. They had sparked the crucial understanding that reading and knowledge were the keys to his freedom. Young as he was, Freddy saw that ignorance was a weapon in the hands of the slaveholder, one that was far more dangerous than the whip.

But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.

But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

I like the pages to turn. I like the bookness of the book.

How did you learn to do that?" asked Hugo. "Books," answered Isabelle.

To read is to strike a blow for culture

Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.

If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn't have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Maybe this was another reason why people read: not so that they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Grandiose, pomp- ous, ever confident of his own brilliance (early in life he decided he had read enough, and thereafter practiced a "cerebral hygiene," refusing to read anything new), he felt he had discovered laws governing the development of the human race that were "as definite as those determining the fall of a stone".

Hey, Geekoid!" yelled Duncan Dougal, "Why do you read so much? Don't you know how to watch TV?

If you always read books, you'll always be happy.

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.