Quotes About Reading

I'm about to get on a plane here, and I'm packing recovery literature. All I know is I'm going to be the guy reading the book on co-dependency. That's what I know about me.

Outside of New York, the sight of someone reading at a bar is rare enough to excite comment; if you're single and aren't in New York and want to meet other people, I'd recommend it as an icebreaking tactic. Don't attempt this in the city itself, though: Your competition will be heavy, and most of the other readers will likely be more attractive and more successful and richer than you.

Si je perdais ma bibliothèque, j'aurais toujours le métro et l'autobus. Un billet le matin, un billet le soir et je lirais les visages. [in Citations de Marcel Jouhandeau]

She reads books all the time. Sometimes for an hour without stopping!" "That's not too good, Galinette. A poor girl who reads books—I can't say I care for that...

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.

It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book.

A well-read man will yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new "good book," as he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books he has read, whereas a good book is something special, unforeseeable, made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

Who cannot recall, as I can, the reading they did in the holidays, which one would conceal successively in all those hours of the day peaceful and inviolable enough to be able to afford it refuge?

Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.

but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge sé stesso. L'opera dello scrittore è soltanto una specie di strumento ottico che è offerto al lettore per permettergli di discernere quello che, senza libro, non avrebbe forse visto in sé stesso.

Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.

We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises.

she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries...

La lectura está en el umbral de la vida espiritual; puede introducirnos en ella: no la constituye.

Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself.

However, many books, Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared to what we spend on our horses?

Membaca, berpikir, mencintai dan berdoa, hal-hal inilah yang membuat orang berbahagia.

Reading is precisely a conversation with men who are both wiser and more interesting than those we might have occasion to meet ourselves. –

Not a big intellectual, he'd nevertheless spent an entire summer reading an English translation of Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust's À la recherché du temps perdu while knitting together the web of a major crack gang that spread over the Twin Cities. He couldn't read French, but the book had made him want to learn the language; he'd just never had time.