Quotes About Reading

this is the best year ever because i am reading the chronicles of vladimir tod

Come here, Cal," she says real gentle, and I come close. Read me something." I open up the book I'm holding, a new one brought this very day. Just chicken scratch, I used to figure, but now I see what's truly there, and I read a little out. That's gift enough," she says, and smiles so big, it makes me smile right back.

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn't drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

On average, schools employing a solely oral approach graduate students at eighteen who read at a fourth-grade level; students from Bi-Bi schools often read at grade level. Spoken English is taught as a useful tool, but is not a primary focus.

As I have said—and as should be obvious—stupid people need to read books in order to get smarter, but unfortunately people who like books are usually smart already, and stupid people do not read.

Description of reading Lord of the Flies for school: It is only 208 pages, I have already read it, and it is not very interesting. It is by William Golding who won an award for showing that boys are mean and badly behaved, even somewhere nice like the beach. This seems like something anyone in the entire world who has ever met a boy could tell you, but they gave William Golding a Nobel Prize for it.

Two's description of reading Lord of the Flies for school: It is only 208 pages, I have already read it, and it is not very interesting. It is by William Golding who won an award for showing that boys are mean and badly behaved, even somewhere nice like the beach. This seems like something anyone in the entire world who has ever met a boy could tell you, but they gave William Golding a Nobel Prize for it.

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.

should be obvious—stupid people need to read books in order to get smarter, but unfortunately people who like books are usually smart already, and stupid people do not read. Maybe this is tragic irony, or maybe cause and effect. I do not know. What I do

people often are, even smart people who read—but it is okay because librarians have witchlike librarian magic to pick the right book for you.

I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

But I do know that any place where there are six novels by the author of Pride and Prejudice must be a very special sort of heaven.

he was supposed to be reading, but it was impossible. She had done something

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow

I don't believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

A poetry reading builds up to a climax, and if it's a success it leaves the audience somewhat high." —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious.

finding a book is no guarantee that you will understand what it means unless there is also someone there who read it to you when you were very young and who may, indeed, have it memorized." (p 154)

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.