reading Quotes

“In my experience, Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”

“I checked this out weeks ago for a bit of light reading.”

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.”

“Honestly, don’t you two read?”

“Run like you have to get to the library.”

“No,” said Hermione shortly. “Have either of you seen my copy of Numerology and Gramatica?” “Oh, yeah, I borrowed it for a bit of bedtime reading,” said Ron, but very quietly.”

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.”

“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.”

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don’t read.”

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

“Now, when I read, I read not, For interrupting tears Obliterate the etchings Too costly for repairs.”

“It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?”

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

“I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”

“Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t.”

“Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.”

“I like to read books twice.”

“Sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”

″[To Kill a Mockingbird] is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.”

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

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

“THEY . . . USED . . . TO . . . READ! They’d READ and READ, AND READ and READ, and then proceed To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!”

“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books and think.”

“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.”

“You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows.”

“No, thank you. I have enough books at home. Maybe another time. I’m rereading something else with my papa. You know, the one I stole from the fire that night.”

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

“She could read anything now, he said, and once you can read anything you can learn everything. It was up to her. “Nobody’s come close to filling their brains,” he said. “We’re all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves.”

I have always enjoyed reading, but I’ve never been sure how to select appropriate material. There are so many books in the world--how do you tell them all apart? How do you know which one will match your tastes and interests?

“So now books were her only friends. She’d read Lord of the Rings so often she could recite whole scenes by memory. “It was not a skill that aided one in becoming popular.”

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”

“A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that.”

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

If reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.

If a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.

I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.

I thanked Captain Nemo, and went up to the shelves of the library. Works on science, morals, and literature abounded in every language; but I did not see one single work on political economy; that subject appeared to be strictly proscribed. Strange to say, all these books were irregularly arranged, in whatever language they were written; and this medley proved that the Captain of the Nautilus must have read indiscriminately the books which he took up by chance.

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.

“He reads much; He is a great observer; and he looks Quite through the deeds of men.”

“Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world.”

“He reads much; He is a great observer; and he looks Quite through the deeds of men.”

“She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s.”

“For all of her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader.”

“Saturdays were different. She treated herself by reading a book not in the alphabetical sequence. On that day she asked the librarian to recommend a book.”

“On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.”

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.”

“What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.”

“My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I’m quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

“As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy . . . the afternoon passed.”

“She planned to read all the books over again when she had finished with the Z’s.”

“Some of the reading had been wonderful; the Louisa Alcott books for example.”

“She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness with someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read.”

“Francie breathed the warm air, watched the dancing leaf shadows, ate the candy and took sips of the cooled water in-between reading the book.”

“She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones.”

“Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”

“She read everything she could find: trash, classics, time tables and the grocer’s price list.”

“My folks never knew how to read or write. I only got to the sixth grade myself -- had to leave school when the old man dies. You kids are lucky. I’m going to see to it that you get through school.”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

“‘Darling,’ she instructed me, ‘would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.‘”

“I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”

“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

“Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

“There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

“Don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think.

“With frightening suddenness he now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket. Matilda froze in horror. The father kept going. There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn’t? How dare she?”

“I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”

College will probably destroy your love for poetry. Hours of boring analysis, dissection, and criticism will see to that. College will also expose you to all manner of literature—much of it transcendent works of magic that you must devour; some of it utter dreck that you must avoid like the plague.

“There was a moment of silence, and Matilda, who had never before heard great romantic poetry spoken aloud, was profoundly moved. ‘It’s like music,’ she whispered.”

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

“I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda said. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.” “You mean you’ve looked at the pictures?” “Yes, but I’ve read the books as well.”

″‘I’m afraid no meals,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘because of getting thin quicker. But we will read to you.‘”

“The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.”

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

“By the time she was three, Matilda had taught herself to read by studying newspapers and magazines that lay around the house. At the age of four, she could read fast and well, and she naturally began hankering after books.”

“Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses.”

“Many nights I drifted off to sleep to his rumbling voice reading from a book of battle strategy. And despite myself, despite what he’d done and what he was, I came to love him. It’s just not a comfortable kind of love.”

“Nice things don’t happen in storybooks,” Taryn says. “Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.”

“If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.”

“All I could think of was that the teachers must’ve found the illegal stash of candy I’d been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they’d realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.”

“Education must be a lifelong pursuit. The person who doesn’t read is not better off than the person who can’t.”

“After dinner the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know...Occasionally, on those nights when we were all reading together, a train would thunder by, shaking the house and rattling the windows. The noise was thunderous, but after we’d been there a while, we didn’t even hear it.”

“She had her addictions and one of them was reading.”

“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.”

“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything except the Lord’s work on a Sunday, but as I wasn’t a born again Christian, any of the Lord’s work I might do, like reading the Shangaan bible to Dee and Sun, wasn’t creating any bricks for my mansion in the sky.”

“I go to bed early and rise late and feel as if I have hardly slept, probably because I have been reading almost the entire time.”

“Bruno had read enough books about explorers to know that one could never be sure what one was going to find.”

[I have learned]“To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with a light and superficial knowledge, nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of.”

“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

“I learned to love the feel of good words.”

“My son is my most precious possession. I have nothing in the world compared to my son. I must know what he is reading.”

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

“Books! What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books? I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling...”

“I know about that because Freak has been showing me how to read a whole book and for some reason it all makes sense, where before it was just a bunch of words I didn’t care about.”

“As a matter of fact I do know the answer—the reason Johnny Tremain got mad and hateful is because he burned his hand in a stupid accident—and I know about that because Freak has been showing me how to read a whole book and for some reason it all makes sense, where before it was just a bunch of words I didn’t care about.”

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road…Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards.”

“You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm.”

“You see, I read all books on hunting published in English, French, and Russian. I have but one passion in my life, Mr. Rainsford, and it is the hunt.”

“‘No. I can survive well enough on my own - if given proper reading material.’”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books . . . They were my teachers and my advisors.”

“I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind.”

“I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books. And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum. No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.”

“I could live inside my books, each one taking me further and further away from the barred windows that held me prisoner.”

“Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers.”

“In Eugene Sue, she studied descriptions of furnishings; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them the imagined satisfaction of her own desires.”

“‘My wife doesn’t have much interest in that,’ said Charles. ‘Even though she has been told she ought to exercise, she’d rather stay in her room all the time and read.‘”

“‘Have you ever had the experience,’ Leon went on, ‘while reading a book, of coming upon some vague idea that you’ve had yourself, some obscure image that comes back to you from far away and seems to express absolutely your most subtle feelings?’”

“How am I supposed to go back to my old life, my days stretching out before me with unending and brutal sameness? How am I supposed to go back to being The Girl Who Reads? Not that I begrudge my life in books. All I know about the world I’ve learned from them. But a description of a tree is not a tree, and a thousand paper kisses will never equal the feel of Olly’s lips against mine.”

“Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.)”

“Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain. I don’t suppose you’ve written anything like that.”

“You can take pretty much any sentence in this book and if you read it enough times, you will probably end up committing a homicide.”

″ The more that you READ, the more things you will KNOW. The more that you LEARN, the more places you’ll GO.”

“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”

“Read this to yourself. Read it silently. Don’t move your lips. Don’t make a sound. Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything. What a wonderfully weird thing, huh?”

“In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help – exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me.”

“It’s not what you will get out of the books that are so enriching, it is what the books will get out of you that will ultimately change your life.”

“What I was afraid of was that everyone present, from the insolent marker down to the lowest little stinking, pimply clerk in a greasy collar, would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest and to address them in literary language. For of the point of honour – not of honour, but of the point of honour – one cannot speak among us except in literary language. You can’t allude to the “point of honour” in ordinary language. I was fully convinced (the sense of reality, in spite of all my romanticism!) that they would all simply split their sides with laughter.”

“Aren’t we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they’ll tell us that we make sense?”

“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

“Well, right when you asked me if I had a name I thought, yeah, he’s right, I do need a name. But I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called ‘How to Name Your Baby’, and out of a hundred and eighty thousand names that’s the one I liked the best.”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”

“As every schoolboy knows, comics do not stand alone at microphones in the dark. Indeed, we cannot even read them in the dark. We need light, the more, the better.”

“And we enjoy comics best in solitary, by ourselves, not in crowds; although large numbers of people read comics, they generally do it by themselves, in silence.”

“The confusion inherent in the word comics has been apparent to those writing in the filed for years. The word has a plural form but is singular in application.”

“In short, comics lacks the precision it ought to have for ordinary communication let alone serious philosophical deliberations.”

“Comics are a sub-set of pictorial narrative; therefore, all comics are pictorial narratives, but not all pictorial narratives are comics.”

“When you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in the truth or information contained in it, express it in your own words, and, if it be important, commit it to the faithful memory.”

“That night I gave another bad reading. I didn’t care. They didn’t care. If John Cage could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon.”

“Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.”

“My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know—he will know and through him we will know.”

“You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.”

“For a long time, Henry Bemis had had an ambition. to read a book. Not just the title or the preface, or a page somewhere in the middle. He wanted to read the whole thing, all the way through from beginning to end. A simple ambition perhaps, but in the cluttered life of Henry Bemis, an impossibility.”

“To think of all the times I’ve wished I could slip into one of my favorite books. But that’s the advantage of reading—you can shut the book whenever you want.”

“I pretended to be really busy reading a book but the truth is—I was watching Moose. If he looked toward me I put my nose back in the book in a hurry. Moose would be number one in my Boy Book if only I was brave enough, but what would Nancy think? She hated him.”

“For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes.”

“llama llama red pajama reads a story with his mama.”

An evil and greedy man has become dictator and turned the Tree into a desolate wasteland, caring only about making money. Toby might be the only one to stop him. Overall, a fast-paced book that keeps you reading, the evil characters seemed a little bit too evil to me and I didn’t realize the book was set-up for a sequel!

“Yes, and he was our little brother. I think that was why”—she thought for a moment, still smiling to herself—“yes, why he told us such impossible stories, such strange imaginings. He was jealous, I think, because we were older—and because we could read better.”

“Leonardo researched until he found the perfect candidate...”

″ If you keep your eyes open enough, oh, the stuff you will learn!”

″ I can read in red. I can read in blue. I can read in pickle color too.”

“If you read with your eyes shut you’re likely to find that the place where you’re going is far, far behind.”

″ You can learn to read music and play a Huz-Zut if you keep your eyes open. But not with them shut.”

“When I keep them open I can read with much more speed. You have to be a speedy reader ‘cause there’s so much to read!

The book is so intuitive and allows so much expression and voice intonation. The characters are distinct individuals and I could instantly find their voice. The art is simply amazing

″ You can learn about SAD, and GLAD, and MAD!”

“That’s why I tell you to keep your eyes wide. Keep them wide open.”

Tender and lyrical prose, gentle and almost achingly poignant moments and a golden daffy-down-dilly air pervading the stories: make sure you grab your tissue box before reading the Kingdom of Silk series.

“My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all; Yet never a printed book withstands the urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf till you can read. O days that pass, that day will come too soon, alas!”

This is a great story about parents not listening to their daughter and said daughter saving their home. It also has wolves...in the walls! It is just the kind of story that should be read aloud, too, full of the rhythms and repeated refrains that fit with oral story telling.

The rhymes and rhythms are masterfully done, and the story is delightful! This is a book that I don’t mind reading over and over. Every time we read it, we discover something new and interesting in the illustrations. This is a must read!

The entire book works. The color wash suits the drawing style which complements the story which is carried by mild misbehavior and mayhem.

Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.

The book is written in second person and the point of view brings you right in to the story. Even difficult classes sit quietly and with interest. The pictures and writing both draw students into the story. The tale of the babies is sweet and everyone feels good after listening to the story.

″‘Don’t you ever get tired of reading about the South Pole?’ ‘No, I don’t. Of course I would much rather go there than read about it. But reading is the next best thing.‘”

“He looked up, as if searching the stars, as if reading a map up there. The moon made his face into a silver mask.”

“That she should be reading at all- a young girl like her- it’s against nature. And in that book! It looks like witchcraft to me.”

“Grace was a girl who loved stories. She didn’t mind if they were read to her or told to her or made up from her own head. She didn’t care if they were from books or movies or out of Nana’s long memory. Grace just loved stories.”

“Annad could not imagine the valley without the village. But Roawn could. Reading the old stories in the house of books, listening half asleep to Timon under the teaching tree, and most of all, sitting on the grass by the stream while the bukshah grazed around him in the silence of the morning, he had often imagined this place as the first settler must have seen it.”

“Sitting in his armchair in his small house at the other side of the wood, he laughed and laughed every time he thought about all the people he had tickled. So, if you are in any way ticklish, beware of Mr Tickle and those extraordinary long arms of his. Just think. Perhaps, he’s somewhere about at this very moment while you’re reading this book.”

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

“we both thought we were on the same page but it turns out we’re reading different stories”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.”

“Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.”

“There’s this word in Japanese: tsundoku,” Neil says suddenly. “It’s my favorite word in any language.” “What does it mean?” He grins. “It means acquiring more books than you could ever realistically read.”

“Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.”

“But Mr. Smith read his newspaper on one end of the bench and Mrs. Smythe looked the other way.”

“A scullery maid? Ridiculous. I was Matilda Cook, daughter of Lucille, granddaughter of Captain William Farnsworth Cook, of the Pennsylvania Fifth Regiment. I could read, write, and figure numbers faster than most. I was not afraid of hard work. I would set my own course.”

“At his father’s insistence, Hoonie learned to read and write Korean and Japanese from the village schoolmaster well enough to keep a boardinghouse ledger and do sums in his head so he couldn’t be cheated at the market.”

“Anastasia’s father, Dr. Myron Krupnik, was a professor de literature and had read just about every book in the world, which may have been why he knew so much about warts. He had a bear the color of Hubbard squash, though not much hair in his head, and he wore glasses for astigmatism, as Anastasia did, although his were not quite as owly.”

″...if one read Whistledown often enough, one could almost feel a part of London Society without actually attending any balls.”

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t even be worth reading.”

“A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading...”

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read.”

“Tom had few ideas on the causes and cures of sleeplessness, and it never occurred to him to complain. At first he tried to read himself to sleep with Aunt Gwen’s schoolgirl stories. They did not even bore him enough for that...”

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people- those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food; and Miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins were typical representatives of their own sort of people.”

“Albert’s uncle says I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip.”

“I’ll solve a puzzle, read a book, and learn a fun new fact!”

“He would lose himself in his favorite books and pamphlets, reading them avidly.”

“One day you will read in the National Geographic of a faraway land with no smelly bad traffic.”

“It’s a Missage,” he said to himself, “that’s what it is. And that letter is a ‘P,’ and so is that, and so is that, and ‘P’ means ‘Pooh,’ so it’s a very important Missage to me, and I can’t read it. I must find Christopher Robin or Owl or Piglet, one of those Clever Readers who can read things, and they will tell me what this missage means. Only I can’t swim. Bother!”

But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.

He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn’t Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren’t looking over his shoulder and saying “Well?”

Owl looked at the notice again. To one of his education the reading of it was easy.

The library was worth going into, passages or no passages. Antony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

“What’s the good of talking about it at all, if it comes to that?” “What, indeed?” said Antony, and to Bill’s great disappointment they talked of books and politics during the meal.

“Shaw, Wilde, Robertson—I like reading plays, Bill. There are not many people who do, but those who do are usually very keen.”

“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.”

“How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate? What is the labor cost of a book?”

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

“While I improved in speech, I also learned the science of letters as it was taught to the stranger, and this opened before me a wide field for wonder and delight.”