Quotes About Reading

Learning to read happens once and once only for most of us, and for the vast majority of adults in first-world countries it happened a long time ago. You have to dig deep, deep down into the bog of the almost lost, and then carry what you have found carefully to the surface, and then you have to find the words and images to describe what you see on your spade.

I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading something that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program...All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over [insert popular contemporary TV program] next time you have a choice.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.

No sé qué decir de él sino que me ha conmovido del modo en que uno desea que lo conmueva cada libro que empieza a leer. Quiero decir que, de algún modo que casi no sabría describir, me ha transformado.

Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were shredded to pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine's spinning blades.

I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book.

Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking.

hearing C-flat against an F-minor humming the lullaby to the rhythm of you reading that silly novel you try to complete each night I rest in your rest while the day snuggles in and sings me to sleep 'After the Day

Of all things I liked books best.

Of all things I liked books the best.

Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word.

reading a book doesn't mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

There's an awful lot you can find in the press. If you do what you really ought to do, start by reading every article from the end, back to the front; most of the lies are up in the front. Turns out there's a lot of stuff back there.

There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.

When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it.... Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.

But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I'm truly beside myself.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.

I can't believe they don't understand that what I'm doing is Much More Important. I'm reading the most wonderful book.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

Here's a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.