Quotes About Reading

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

There were books everywhere in my house. Books were very present. I just loved books. I never understood reading as anything but a pleasurable activity from a very young age.

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

I read. It's also nice for me to get involved in schoolwork, which is a totally different world than acting. It makes me feel like I am doing things that normal people are doing at my age.

As a young girl, I was very proud at overcoming a reading handicap whilst other girls of my age read abundantly.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Veins raised themselves along the backs of my hands that summer. My handwriting changed several times. I began reading Time magazine. Soon after that it was time to go.

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

A Sunday morning spent reading the paper together, maybe drinking some mimosas, alone, and talking until noon. That would be pretty amazing. Married couples with kids will understand.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

And there was a perfectly lovely room called the Browsing Room, with shelf upon shelf of books, and several tall windows looking out into the trees, and easy chairs with reading lamps, and sofas. It was far and away the finest, most comfortable room I had ever seen in my life, and I loved to sit in it.

Books were a dependable pleasure.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It's not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else's world. To find myself in someone else's words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious