c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.
— Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
There's no book that absolutely everyone loves.
— Carolyn  Parkhurst
The promised notification was hanging over her head. The postman's knock within the neighbourhood was beginning to bring its daily terrors -and if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. “Ah, you’re a Trollope man, are you?”	“I’m not sure I am, really,” said Nick. “I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?”	Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.”	“Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.”	“No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage.
— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. 
— Henry David Thoreau
Despereaux was reading the story out loud to himself. He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end...
— Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.
— Sarah Orne Jewett
In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.
— Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!
Wisdom, ambition, sadness, joy, malice, grief, amazement, all the emotions which blaze within the human soul may be recorded on a page. Nestled in a sheaf of paper sleeps an infinity beyond the limits of the universe. Just by opening a single page, we may fly into that infinity.
— Tanigawa Nagaru
But I can't translate it the right way, that's why I always use so many languages around you, because there're some things that simply can't translate, that are beautiful when you read them the original way.
— DarknessAndLight, I Sold Myself To The Devil For Vinyls... Pitiful I Know
I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep
— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did,and as was the case with all addicts,gratification was the important thing.
— Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
I couldn't convince her that if I had a book with me, I wasn't lonely.
— Alyxandra Harvey, Bleeding Hearts
Reading is an addiction, much like living and breathing is an addiction.
— Jeffrey Michael
Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.
— Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....""Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible," Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ....
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.
— Richard Russo, Mohawk
Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.
— John Green
Owning a book is a third of the goal. The others are actually reading it and applying it.
— Israel Wayne
The Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has just published the story of her life. I confess that it is not in my reading table.
— Mick Jagger
...And if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Learning to read is one of the most extraordinary gifts you'll ever receive, so open up God's Word and read the most extraordinary book ever written.
— J.E.B. Spredemann
Hurried reading can never be good reading
— Georg Joachim Goschen
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
— György Ligeti
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. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books.
— Luisa Weiss
Reading is not optional.
— Walter Dean Myers
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.
— Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
Books are best preserved in the minds of readers.
— Kat Lowe, Dream Cat
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
Find a quiet place, and just read. If you’re reading an ebook, clear away everything else but your ebook reader.Then you settle into the reading, and enjoy it. Bask in the luxury of reading without distractions.
— Leo Babauta, Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction
The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance.
— Arlo Bates, Talks on the study of literature
I am ashamed to say this, but as a child, neither my parents not my teachers pushed me to read. In fact, I did not read an entire book through until I was a grown man and had learned the awesome power of reading on my own.
— Daniel Whyte III
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.
— Richard Peck
My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.
— Wendy Froud
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.
— Bill Richardson, Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast
But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
I don't know what's more tragic, knowing how to read and choosing not to, or not knowing how to read and refusing to learn.
— Patricia Goldbach
Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t want to be one of these bewildered schmucks. The things that you understand will inform your writing. The bigger your mind, the better your work is going to be. You’re not born with a big mind; you have to build it. If I don’t read for an hour a day, I get ill.
— Jeanette Winterson
So go ahead. Do it—open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you’re absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords—your fractures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people and why. It’s all right there—your stories are written right there on your face!
— Christopher Boucher
Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder...
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
— Walter Dean Myers
My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
— W.H. Auden
So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.
— Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook
Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be.That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.
— Bernard Kops
What’d you need?""Desuetude.""Reading again, are we? Could be dangerous. It means to become unaccustomed to. As in something gets discontinued, falls into disuse.""Thanks, man.""That it?""Yeah, but we should grab a drink sometime.
— James Sallis, Drive
And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago.
— Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars
How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.
— Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can't help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material.p 97
— Michael Perry
The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
[When asked about Writing Conferences]"You meet people that will change your life.
— Susan Wingate, Drowning
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.
— Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict
Reading Plato should be easy
—  understanding Plato can be difficult.
There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.
— Madeleine L'Engle
The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and elevated opinions.
— Christopher Henry Dawson
We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development  part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern"  has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so  and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few  have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.
— James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.
— Lawrence Wright
In our land of opportunities and distractions, it's hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It's as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can't have the intimate conversation we most yearn for.
— Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life
Enjoy the read!
— Kirstin van Dyke
I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
— Don DeLillo
Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey...
— Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars
Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76
— Anita Brookner, A Family Romance
That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such "strategies" as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework.
— Roger Sutton, A Family of Readers: The Book Lover's Guide to Children's and Young Adult Literature
We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..
— k.j. force
Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.
— Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics
an incredibly beautiful read
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mariners 2001: A Joy Ride into the Record Books
Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo.(Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.)
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period home room listening to the teacher divide up our activities into purposeful sections. I got a grip on her process, at last, by picturing it in the following way: A cow stands in clover. When she is milked, that is her work; when she is merely eating, that is her play. But the problem lay, then as now, in the realization that, in any case, she is standing in clover. Not a handsome or elegant analogy, but it approximates for me the habit of reading - standing in a world of clover, the eating of which is occasionally utilitarian, usually nourishing, because that's what one does
— Toni Morrison
...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...
— Janet Frame
I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.
— Zadie Smith, Swing Time
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
(She) could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching up the makeshift constructs.
— Gerhard Amanshauser
Literacy is a fundamental life skill, one that serves as a portal to knowledge and a lifetime of opportunity.
— Story Shares
I gave Henry a supscription [sic] to the Book of the Month club that tells you the book you have to read every month to make your individuality stand out. And it really is remarkable, because it makes over 50,000 people read the same book every month.
— Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes
Didn't you read the owner's ma
— Jim Butcher, The Aeronaut's Windlass
Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.
— Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
His granny taught him to read, see. I reckon it overheated his mind.
— Terry Pratchett, Mort
When you read mistakes, learn from it!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Remember, when we're lost in a story, we're not passively reading about something that's happening to someone else.
— Lisa Cron
Reading is dreaming with eyes wide open
— Unknown
In the great tradition of Paris Is Burning, bring out your library cards! Because reading is what? Fundamental!
— RuPaul
Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
I always used to read aloud to her in the evenings--
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is!
— Arthur Conan Doyle
She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale. So she read instead, and admired those who could.
— Nora Roberts, Enchanted
Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience.
— Kevin Focke
In essence , games are the only universally serious activity . They leave no room for skepticism , wouldn't you agree ? However incredulous or doubting you might be , if you want to play , you have no choice but to follow the rules . Only the person who respects the rules , or at least knows and applies them , can win . Reading a book is the same : you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story .
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
Story of civilization starts with reading, and story of creativity starts with writing
— Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi
Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are.
— Gunnhild Øyehaug, Knots: Stories
Read everything you can push into your skull. Read your motherâ€™s diary. Read Assata. Read everything Gloria Steinem and bell hooks write. Read all of the poems your friends leave in your locker. Read books about your body written by people who have bodies like yours. Read everything that supports your growth as a vibrant, rebel girl human. Read because youâ€™re tired of secrets.
— Gabby Rivera, Juliet Takes a Breath
Keep reading! Keep travelling! Keep thinking! And finally you will be there, in the Land of Wisdom where the mind has the power of an eagleâ€™s eye!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Reading is just staring at a dead piece of wood for hours and hallucinating.
— Unknown
Quiet,â€� she hissed at me, her voice shockingly aggressive for such a small person. â€œOtherwise, Iâ€™ll shut you up myself.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
I was just thinking that it would be nice if, for once in a while, life made things easier,â€� I told him, feeling annoyed. â€œWhy does life have to throw impossible tasks at us all the time for crying out loud?â€� At hearing my debate, Luna huffed.â€œBecause lifeâ€™s a bitch,â€� she growled under her breath, sulking. â€œThatâ€™s why.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
Clearly, this was another thing I needed to add to the: â€˜repetitive cycle of things that were constantly happening in my lifeâ€™ list, which currently contained fainting and my ability to find trouble.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
Of course they were eaten,â€� he retorted, his eyes flashing in cold humour. â€œTrolls generally arenâ€™t exactly renowned for being vegetarians.
— Adele          Rose
Itâ€™s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
Wellâ€¦itâ€™s whether you want to face certain death by taking a risk on the other route or almost certain death by scaling the walls?â€� she replied. â€œTherefore, for me, considering our options, itâ€™s a no brainer.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
Man Iâ€™m hot,â€� I exclaimed, fanning myself. The combination of climbing out of the cave and the sun meant that I was perspiring like crazy. â€œWhy thank you,â€� retorted Blaine, smirking. â€œIâ€™m pleased that my presence causes that kind of reaction.
— Adele          Rose, Shattered
She read about people she could never be and adventures she'd never have.
— Unknown
Donâ€™t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if itâ€™s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and thatâ€™s almost the same thing.
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
They say no one reads anymore, but I find that's not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they're not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I've receivedâ€“ also the only reader letters I've receivedâ€“ have come from prisoners. Maybe we're all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?
— Rivka Galchen, American Innovations: Stories
For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won't lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you'll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.
— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd, Min kamp 5
Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.
— Rick Gekoski, Darke
If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
— Rick Gekoski, Darke
...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
— Rick Gekoski, Darke
I canâ€™t get past one or two pages at a time.â€™ â€˜Thatâ€™s how itâ€™s supposed to be read. Sipped like a soothing cup of tea.
— Sadeqa Johnson, And Then There Was Me
From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.
— Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing
What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.
— Edith Wharton, The Quicksand
If we can't have world peace, I'll settle for a quiet room.
— Joyce Rachelle
I like how books let you into another world, but how it's secret. Like, when you read, the world you see is different from the one someone else sees when they read the same words. It's just yours.
— Clare Fisher
What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.
— Don Roff
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
— Charlie Munger
Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
It's not a silly pursuit to read beyond what's handed to you, to seek out new voices and leap over the usual books everyone's already talking about and see what you can find on your own.Making definitive choices about what we spend our time on as readers can make a statement, a difference. We can lift other writers up, give space and attention to more voices than the ones that already have all the space and attention.There is power in what we choose to consume as readers, and there is power in what we choose to amplify, celebrate, and share.
— Nova Ren Suma, Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World
What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?
— Sergio Troncoso
If you read, you shall renew your mind.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My favourite book is the Holy Bible.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Have you tried reading the Holy Scripture?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.
— Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read
I look upon fine phrases as a lover. - John Keats
— Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World
If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.
— Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language
I’ve lowered my character with a great deal of unwholesome reading material.
— Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Spring
like traveling without knowing what country you’re going to
— Austin Wright, Nocturnal Animals
Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don;t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I amMavis Elizabeth Betterly.I amused to hard work.I canrun a household betterthan Mrs. Oblinger ever could.What does it matter,those thingsthat hold me back?What does it matterwhen I make mistakes?They don't make mewhoIam.
— Caroline Starr Rose, May B.
Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.
— Anonymous
To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.
— Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
I have noticed that when people tell their own stories, often it has less to do with wanting to communicate an idea to another than with clarifying an emotion to themselves. Or when the subject of the story is beloved and missing, as a way to make them here and alive.
— Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty
A good story invites us into someone else's world where we learn, discover commonalities, and leave with compassion and understanding.
— Lynda Cheldelin Fell
Our masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they’re also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don’t. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously.
— Beth Revis, Paper Hearts, Volume 1: Some Writing Advice
Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.
— Nick Lake, There Will Be Lies
But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond.....
— Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.
— Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read
They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment… She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn’t her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn’t she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids’ book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.
— Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed
This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional—it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story.
— Angie Thomas
A good book should make you think at the end, not just give a solution to the problem at the end.
— Sydney 4363
You can tell a lot about a person's priorities in life by reading their will.
— Steven Magee
A Writer Drenched in Words is Never Caught in a Dry Spell
— Anonymous
You really will be better off in life if you read a lot.
— Sydney Fauser
Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.
— Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Get a good book, get few bottles of water or few cups of tea/coffee or Chocolate milk and start reading.
— Deyth Banger
The girl whose table I occupied was reading a book but I couldn’t help but notice that all this time, she was secretly watching me.“You are beautiful.”I took my eyes off my phone and I saw the girl talking to me. I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say or how to react.
— Nico J. Genes, Magnetic Reverie
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
— Beverly Cleary
I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet," scoffed Marilla. "You'll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put to your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
— Louis Althusser
Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them
— Malebo Sephodi
If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.
— Margaret Atwood
Love is quite like reading, I expect. Once you know how, you can't ever imagine not doing it.
— Kerrigan Byrne, The Highwayman
Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.
— Richard Seaver, The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings
Sometimes a book that appeared dull or off-putting would somehow still draw you in, call to you, and when you finally embarked on the adventure inside you found yourself partaking in something wondrous and unfathomably rich.
— Liam W. Russell, The Request: and other freaky short stories
By reading can make you more clever
— Herman Sahdi
I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.
— Han Nolan, Dancing on the Edge
Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
You know what it's like to *lose* yourself in a story. We have brother and sister *souls*.
— Mike Carey, The Unwritten, Vol. 5: On to Genesis
When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather.
— Joyce Rachelle
What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.
— Will Advise
A reading appetite is quirky, singular, and essential
— Penny Kittle, Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers