Quotes About Reading

I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It's like when you're starting to read...it's that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning.

I don't remember what book it was - it almost doesn't matter, because the sensation of being read to is so much more powerful than any individual story.

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience

It was cool to see reading become such a transparent act–it was as if her face had a different expression for each punctuation mark, and when there was dialogue you could see her actually listening to it in her head.

Rhiannon finds me like that, in the selfless reading space that the mind loans out.

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience." - David Levithan

I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes—I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back.

The point of books was to combat loneliness

David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it's done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.

Por qué el Escritor a veces parece admirar el Ulises aún más cuando piensa en él que cuando efectivamente lo lee?

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm.

In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.

The writers she prefers are long dead and are on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is 700 pages long, and the author photo is an engraving, it's either hers or Hugh's.

When apple-picking season ended, I got a job in a packing plant and gravitated toward short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

He told me that his sister is clinically depressed and read Naked during a month-long visit to a psychiatric hospital. According to him, once she'd finished, she loaned it to a fellow patient, who, in turn, loaned it to someone else. The book seemed to lift people's spirits, and as a result, the hospital has made it recommended reading. I'm not sure whether I believe this, but it's extremely flattering to think my book is being passed around a German asylum.

If something is written in your native language and it's taking you half a year to get through it, unless you're being paid by the hour to read it, I'd say there's a problem.

February 13, 1989 Chicago Tonight at Barbara's Bookstore, Tobias Wolff read from his new memoir, This Boy's Life.

But it isn't like real work. The travel can occasionally be taxing, but anyone can turn pages and read out loud. What takes time are the postshow book signings—my fault because I talk too much.

593 Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library's worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.