Quotes About Reading

I was never a 'Mills and Boon' kind of a person.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

I'm entirely of the mindset that when it comes to books, they've got to be paper.

My dad was a miner, but he was very much an intellectual. He loved to read.

I was a huge rereader, so I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia, at minimum, 13 times each. In reading that series, I realized that someone had written those books, and that was that person's job. And I thought, 'That is the job for me. That is the job I'm going to have when I grow up.'

Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.

Oft lese ich ganze Seiten und weiß gar nicht, was ich gelesen habe. Ich fange dann noch einmal von vorn an und entdecke, daß das schön ist, was ich gelesen habe. Es handelt von Menschen, die unglücklich sind.

Wehe, Sie lesen eindringlicher, Sie ruinieren sich alles, was Sie lesen. Es ist ganz gleich, was Sie lesen, es wird am Ende lächerlich und ist am Ende nichts wert. Hüten Sie sich vor dem Eindringen in Kunstwerke, sagte er, Sie verderben sich alles und jedes, selbst das Geliebteste.

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?

Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences.

reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Own the books you read. Also poems, stories, flash fiction, plays, memoirs, movies, creative nonfiction, and all the rest. ... take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.

Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary works. Really, though, it's all a form of play. So play, Dear Reader, play. And fare thee well.

Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.

I shan't forget you, Jude,' he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. 'Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.

be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.

I like reading and all that, but a crave to get back to the life of my infancy and all its freedom. (Sue Bridehead)

The truth is, that I never care much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help it.  And

He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.

A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest-minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. The Profitable Reading of Fiction 1888

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice. -- Hannibal Lecter