Best 400 quotes in «reading books quotes» category

Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren’t completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling

Sometimes when Rose was reading, she would catch a whiff of the musty smell of her book. She put her nose down in the fold and inhaled deeply so that wonderful smell, the smell of adventure in faraway lands, would fill her up. She rubbed her hand across the pages to feel the velvety surface of the paper. When she closed her eyes, her fingertips could even feel the words that were printed there, each letter raised just a little, almost like the special language that her blind aunt Mary could read. To Rose, a book was as real and alive as if it breathed and walked and spoke.

Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued: "In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

SUPPORT LITERACY! A child who cannot read cannot text.

Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.

Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.

Tanco el llibre en silenci, deixo que s'esvaeixin les últimes vivències provocades per les escenes finals, per les paraules dites, per l'atmosfera que m'ha acompanyat durant us dies o tal volta unes setmanes. I em sento neguitós perquè a partir d'aquell instant ja no conviuré amb uns personatges amb els quals he gaudit d'una estranya intimitat perquè eren tan meus com els meus pensaments.

That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.

That was what the books did—they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn't have your own.

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking - the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.

The book you read and read well, over and over again, lives in you, becomes your thought and thinking pattern, teaches you all the time and keeps reminding about how to act and react towards things and occurrences’ in life!

The Bible is the greatest book ever written.

The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it. - Sidelines

The book you read and read well, over and over again, lives in you, becomes your thought and thinking pattern, teaches you all the time and keeps reminding you about how to act and react towards things and occurrences’ in life!

The biggest twist in fiction might be a story ending exactly how you thought it would.

the book I was reading turned out to be crack

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

The cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

The ending of a book is, in my experience, both the best and worst part to read. For the ending will often determine whether you love or hate the book. Both emotions lead to disappointment. If the ending was good, and the book was worth your time, then you are left annoyed and depressed because there is no more book to read. However, if the ending was bad, then it's too late to stop reading. You're left annoyed and depressed because you wasted so much time on a book with a bad ending. Therefore, reading is obviously worthless, and you should go spend your time on other, more valuable pursuits.

The man who does not read miss a great literature of knowledge. You must dare to read and reread.

The elevator doors opened, and I squeezed myself out before pulling out the Wardrober. It was heavy. “What do you have in there?” I said. “Your whole house?” “Almost,” Simone laughed. “My favorite books.

The first stair to failure is ignorance. Keep learning by leaning on the lap of information and you'll take the lead!

The library became the cathedral where I would come to worship amd the stories were as precious to me as prayers.

The most comfortable place for a tired mind is in the lap of a book.

The most fantastic thing you could film is people reading. I don't see why no one's done it... The movie you'd make would be a lot more interesting than most of them.

The pages of a book are given life only as they are opened

There is no greater joy than to share what you love with those who appreciate it.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

There are diverse ways of reading texts, depending on who you are. We all access books differently.

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.

There is, at its center, something immutably miraculous about the substance and process of reading stories. We read because we hunger to know, to empathize, to feel, to connect, to laugh, to fear, to wonder, and to become, with each page, more than ourselves. To become creatures with souls. We read because it allows us, through force of mind, to hold hands, touch lives, speak as another speaks, listen as another listens, and feel as another feels. We read because we wish to journey forth together. There is, despite everything, a place for empathy and compassion and rumination, and just knowing that fact, for me, is an occasion for joy. That we still, in this frenetic and bombastic and self-centered age, have legions of people who can and do return to the quietness of the page, opening their minds and hearts, again and again, to the wild world and the stuff of life, pinned into scenes and characters and sharp images and pretty sentences--well. It sure feels like a miracle, doesn't it?

There is no ME without books; they’re everything I remember from childhood, from maturity … All that’s happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

There is no other escape like a book. Reading expands your mind and opens your world to a myriad of possibilities.

There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others…

The question isn't whether I have time to read or not (time that nobody will ever give me, by the way), but whether I'll allow myself the pleasure of being a reader.

The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.

There are books that change our perspectives and books that change our personalities.

There is something magical about losing yourself in a world that doesn't exist.

There is something to be said about the sense of accomplishment the reader feels when finishing a book in one sitting.

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.

There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.

These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.

The stories she'd read of others' lives over these last few months had left her with a greater appreciation for the thread of her own life.

The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the materials of his work, during reading separates out again the unformed and the formed aspects of the book—and if the reader were to work through the book according to his own idea, a second reader would refine it still more, with the result that, since the mass that had been worked through would constantly be poured into fresh vessels, the mass would finally become an essential component—a part of the active spirit. Through impartial rereading of his book the author can refine his book himself. With strangers the particular character is usually lost, because the talent of fully entering into another person’s idea is so rare. Often even in the author himself. It is not a sign of superior education and greater powers to justifiably find fault with a book. When receiving new impressions, greater sharpness of mind is quite natural.

The thing about books was, the more you read and liked them, the more you wanted to have on hand to read. Before you knew it you needed more bookshelves, and then all of the sudden they filled your house.

The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.

The world of books captured my heart.

They are a brilliant device for shape-shifting as we can slip into the skin of authors from other times, other cultural backgrounds, brilliant minds who give us a new perspective on life and the world - something we all need from time to time. - Cornelia Funke