Reading Quotes

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“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.”
― Nora Ephron

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
― Margaret Fuller

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?”
― Christopher Paolini

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis