Quotes About Reading

Underline in your books, jot notes in the margins, and turn the corners of your pages down. Public education is a beautiful dream, but public classrooms too often train students not to mark, write in, disfigure, or in any way make books permanently their own. You're a grownup now, so buy your own books if you possibly can. In my opinion, a cheap paperback filled with your own notes is worth five times as much as a beautiful collector's edition.

In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power

When you read, you develop wisdom—or, in Mortimer Adler's words, "become enlightened." "To be informed," Adler writes in How to Read a Book, "is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.

As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot down specific phrases, sentences, and paragraphs as you come across them; when you've finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary about what you've learned; and then write your own reactions, questions, and thoughts.

And how shall I think of you?' He considered a moment and then laughed. 'Think of me with my nose in a book!

Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.

It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.

Most rats read. Our frustration is, we cannot hold a pen to write.

You come up and read books?" asked Gregor. "Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me,

This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another.

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it.

Sometimes I think that the long-term work of reading is to discover one by one, the books that hold the scattered elements of our nature, after which the true consummation can begin. We undertake the gradual focused exploration, nuance by nuance, of their meanings, their implications; we follow out the strands that mysteriously connect the words of another with the unformulated stuff of the self.

What reading does...is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequenced of lived moments, but a destiny.

The thing about reading is that if you are hooked, you're not going to stop just because one series is over; you're going to go and find something else.

I'm such a magpie. I'll get halfway through one thing and pick up something else. I always have 5 or 6 books open and spine-up by my bed: it's like a row of tents. I don't finish nearly as many books as I should.

When you have an iPad and 75 books on it, it's so easy to go, 'I'm bored, I'm just going to read something else.'

The biggest kick is reading something new and exciting and then getting other people to share your enthusiasm. Beyond all the cant and hypocrisy in publishing, that's what it's all about.

I've always thought that a Saturday morning at home should be education time. I mean fun education, for example learning to cook a dish or reading about something new. So I put on documentaries, get a bunch of magazines and newspapers and use the morning to make myself better.

I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's.

My idea of going to hell is going somewhere where there are no books.

I think relaxation is escaping from your everyday encounters. You can read the words on a page and be transported to somewhere else. And the more consumed you are with it, the more you're cocooned.

I must confess that I'm not a great reader. At the moment I'm reading my son's 'Stig of the Dump' by Clive King and I've got a plant catalogue on the go.

I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.