c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
So you’re a reader,” My mom sighs, as if somehow this elevates Isabel to yet another realm of perfection.
— Denis Markell, Click Here to Start
I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
Reading is for pleasure
—  it’s not another form of social competition. Leave those literary Joneses to it.
The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
— Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything -- we need only listen.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
She just wanted - had always wanted - a good book to read. Being chased by hellhounds and blowing things up were comparatively unimportant parts of the job. Getting the books - now, that was what *really* mattered to her.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
Great books help you understand and they help you feel understood.
— John Green
I'm alone inside the world of the story, my favorite feeling in the world.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
By reading books, you lose your old self and you find your new self! To read is to travel from self to another self!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Make wise choices about what you read. Read only what is necessary or worthwhile. And then take the time to read carefully. One book read with concentration and reflected upon is worth a hundred flashed through without any absorption at all.
— Eknath Easwaran, Take Your Time: How to Find Patience, Peace, and Meaning
I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.
— Diriye Osman
Always and Everywhere a Book Is Waiting for Me
— Lidija Dimkovska, A Spare Life
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays
In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forbears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom both internally and externally. Internally, we reply as we grapple to make sense of this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community.
— C. Christopher Smith, Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish
Is the healing process the writing or the reading of that writing?What are we all healing from? Ourselves?What are we all healing towards? Ourselves?
— Michal Coret, Becoming What I Might Be
Create life, that allow you to have a free flow from inside. This will happen when you improve your inner world and create life more out of understanding.
— Roshan Sharma
We know by intuition and study that great books approach a condition both above and below human — what Lesser means by “grandeur and intimacy” — and our job is to place ourselves somewhere on the continuum between those shifting poles, to welcome a gravid agitation or be willing to undergo some form of personal torsion; to have our personhood both threatened and amplified.
— William Giraldi
I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
...'To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.'– Ecclesiastes 12:12
— Jehovah, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
I had begun reading the book on the plane just after take-off. And I realised that something does happen to you when you read fiction above ground: The intensity of each word and phrase is magnified and the world which the writer has created for you takes on a greater dimension than before. After a while, you can't tell fiction from fact.
— Phan Ming Yen, lost bodies: poems between portugal and home
There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.
— Régis Debray, A Modest Proposal: A Plan for the Golden Years
I never knew a sorrow that an hour of reading could not assuage, a great man had once said. Let's put it to the test.
— Anna Gavalda, Hunting and Gathering
At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy.
— Steven Magee
We were not meant to read stories anymore. We were too busy writing our own.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books...
— Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood
She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.
— Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood
She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers— awful, as usual— their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.
— Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood
Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul.
— Elif Shafak, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
But one day he said to me:‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’‘I’m sorry?’‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.
— Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
A library — a place full of books! Imagine!" Ivy couldn't imagine a place closer to heaven. Think of all the books you could read!
— Gemma Jackson, Through Streets Broad and Narrow
As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.
— Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
A non-reading society is nothing but a miserable society
—  a non-reading nation will be nothing but a disgrace of all other nations!
Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?I know it can.(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)
— Dorothy Allison (Author)
Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
— Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
And then I keep reading, anyway—but not just because I like the story. I like knowing that I'm touching her with my words. That they're crawling in her ears as she sleeps.
— Colleen Oakley, Close Enough to Touch
Books are not distractions. Rather, they are, and have been, the most profound and accurate mirrors man has ever crafted.
— RJ Arkhipov
Having had this kind of binge reading relationship with online content for 15 years we're starting to think 'Hang on, we only have finite time and there is infinite content'.
— Seb Emina
All this time I thought you were reading to escape the world, but now I know, you didn’t read to escape it; you read to discover it.
— Brittainy C. Cherry, The Silent Waters
I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading — the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story — and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play.
— Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
I loved college... I knew exactly why I was there and what I wanted to get out of it. I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find our who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it.
— Jeanette Walls
I have found that the morning is far more accessible when a good book awaits you.
— Chris Matakas, The Tao of Jiu Jitsu
Reading is like diving into an ocean of an alternate world, away from your real world, where in spite of going though the pain and pleasure of the characters, you remain a witness, unscathed.
— Anirudha Lakshminarasimhan
To read a poemIs to see light where there is darknessIs to hear silence where there is noiseIs to dance where there is no musicIs to sing where the only instrument is wordsAnd the stirring, impassioned pauses
— A.A. Patawaran, HAI[NA]KU and other poems
For a storyteller, an open ending leaves much room for imagination; for the inquisitive reader, however, it is a source of great anxiety.
— Joyce Rachelle
I can't remember the poemThat pierced through my heartIt was the saddest I heardOf all truths ever spokenIt left a scar in meA wound that doesn't healBut the words are forgottenSo is a big part of me
— A.A. Patawaran, HAI[NA]KU and other poems
Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.
— Clarice Lispector
Reading brings power to the mind and power brings freedom to the mind. Though you ought to read, read what is noble and worthy of not just your time, but your lifetime!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I read for pleasureIn search of fictional worldsTo enrich my truths
— A.A. Patawaran, HAI[NA]KU and other poems
F(r)iction is the best of everything we’ve ever loved. F(r)iction is experimental. F(r)iction is strange. F(r)iction pokes the soft spots, touches nerves most would rather remain protected. F(r)iction is secrets and truths and most importantly—stories. F(r)iction is weird, in every respect.
— Tethered by Letters
But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
— H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.
— Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democrac.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
— Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd
When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.
— Anna Dewdney
How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?
— Molly O'Keefe, Everything I Left Unsaid
The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.
— China Miéville, This Census-Taker
It was always after reading tales such as these that she wondered how on earth it was that some young ladies did not read at all, or declared they had no interest in it. Didn't they know how you could feel so much from a book? Didn't they know how your heart could race and break from words on a page? Had they never read something so wonderful and horrible that they felt as though the very would should stop and pause to acknowledge the depth of feeling it produced?
— Margaux Gillis, Ravenwood
I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Reading is weightlifting for the brain
— Tim Green
Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Punctuation are like road signs
—  without them we just may get lost...
I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple minds who can't take in the strong content they provide
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.
— Alice Hoffman, Survival Lessons
Books … they’re kind of a compulsion for me. To find a great bookstore is a great thing.
— Philip Seymour Hoffman
Growing up in the digital age, I'm expected to embrace all forms of modern technology with blissful ignorance. Books were always one of few escapes from this, because reading a book means not having to look at another damned glowing screen - which is why, no matter how "convenient" or "enhanced" digital enthusiasts claim that Ebooks are, I'll never see them as real books. They're just files of binary data, and while they might be considered books by a large amount of people, Ebooks have lost the human quality that real books have. You can argue that this is pretentious or stupid or nostalgic, but ultimately what will you pass down to your children and grandchildren? A broken old Kindle device with the same files that millions of other people have, or the dog-eared paperbacks that you fell in love with and wrote your name in and got signed by the author and flipped through in the bookstore and kept with you for years, like an old friend?
— Rebecca McNutt
But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.
— Sarah Crossan, One
Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.
— Jenny Colgan, The Little Shop of Happy Ever After
So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.
— Terri Windling
There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier; to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduct between the two worlds.
— Jenny Colgan, The Little Shop of Happy Ever After
Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years.
— Rebecca McNutt
I'm the same way about the bookshop. You know, I walk around and I feel the whole world is in there, the most important stories of all time.
— Caroline Kepnes, You
When we buy books we're fooling ourselves into thinking we buy the time to read them.
— Gerard VanDerleun
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
— Adriana Trigiani, The Queen of the Big Time
Listening to podcast, reading a book, listening to an aduibook and watching films isn't waste of time. It's how somebody becomes wise!
— Deyth Banger
School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, One Word
You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That’s all there is to it.
— Yannick Murphy, This Is the Water
When you come to any passage you don't understand, read it again: if you still don't understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.
— Lewis Carroll
You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca
What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.
— Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
— Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Counselling in Action
Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.
— Sarah Van Arsdale
I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.
— Dana Carvey
In great thick dusty books he readAnd hardly ever went to bedBefore it was e
— Mervyn Peake, Complete Nonsense
Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.
— Edna Ferber, Ice Palace
But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.
— Cecelia Ahern, Flawed
But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
— Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South
The world is full of disappointment," I said."Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?""No," I said. "There's more than that.""Like what?""Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once.
— Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.
— Kamand Kojouri
I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.
— Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I’ve had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I know, Ezra, that I tend to be a bit impulsive at times, but it all seems so reasonable at the time I do these things, and so unreasonable when everyone looks back at what happened and what I did
— L.A. Meyer, In the Belly of the Bloodhound: Being an Account of a Particularly Peculiar Adventure in the Life of Jacky Faber
Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.
— Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
I couldn’t comprehend why she still hadn’t stopped him because it’s clearly every mother’s responsibility to protect her children. After all, that’s the trust that bonds a mother and her child together, forever
— Veronika Gasparyan, Mother at Seven
He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Senor Sempere believed we are all a part of something, and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost, but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain” (p. 348).
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El juego del ángel
Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and associations, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.
— Barry López, About This Life
Books can kill you, while you are reading.
— Deyth Banger
...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.
— Keith  Miller, The Book of Flying
The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.
— Caitlin Moran, Moranthology
Read! It is as important as breathing until you are breathing.
— Hira Shahid Kazim
My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
I think, therefore I am?No, I simply am.I am. I am. I am.I will still be if I didn't think. In fact, it is only then that I would step into a different dimension of consciousness.Yes, I will still be if I didn't think. I will still be if I stopped breathing. I will still be because you still are. My words are written and you are receiving them. We are dancing. We are making love.And when you stop reading them, they will still be because nothing ever truly ceases to exist. There is not a thing that is not. Every thought, energy, and vibration is recycled. I am and I will continue to be because I manifest as the universe, therefore I will continue to manifest as the universe.
— Kamand Kojouri
Read every day and learn from what you read.
— Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.
— Ann Hood, The Book That Matters Most
If you read a book which does not make you wonder, ponder!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
If I say I don't want to read the book, I don't want to read the book.
— Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
— Max Lerner
Reading & Thinking Breeds limitless progress.
— Auliq-Ice
a town with more drinking joints than reading joints has a problem reading can solve
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
But I cant' translate it the right way, that's why I always use so many foreign 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
In truth, Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
To be perfectly honest, I think she became sick of Society during her debut season. Better to lock herself in her room with her books than to spend her life paying calls and going to balls.
— Shanna Swendson, Rebel Mechanics
Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.
— Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning
Addiction to reading... There are worse things in the world to be Addicted to. I admire your hobby choice it's mine as well.
— Christy A. Mair
Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.
— Kate Morton, The Lake House
Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.
— Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation
From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
— Samuel Johnson
Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
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.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Reading is a test, Its test like a water drop.Famine like you din't even saw it, but when you try to read a book its hard to take a startup but then as long as you read it you getting inside of it!
— shuhab
My next option is to only write a list of the books I like, but then again, I don’t read a book I don’t like so it doesn’t solve any of my problems.
— Genesis Quihuis
Too much reading is a bad habit. No one likes a girl who squints.
— Kathleen Tessaro, Rare Objects
Reading takes you places; it is all up to your imagination. The world (or in this case book) is your canvas, go paint it.
— BOB
But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because the just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
— Rick Bragg
Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
— Susan Reynolds
Rereading, we find a new book
— Mason Cooley
Leave me alone,Do me a favor, abandon me,I want to think about,You me and the idea of forever.
— Rohit Hora
Word porn is the best porn when the imagination is well endowed.
— Dez Marie, Sugar Whipped
Why are you crying?""I was reading.
— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
I rushed to the living room to protect myself from I don't know what, behind my best friend, a book.
— Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis
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.
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
I'll have enough books when they fill my room like the stars fill the sky.
— E.V. Fairfall
She probably had her nose stuck in a book, living in a pretend fantasy world while I was actually out there living in the real fantasy world.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Oblivion
Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?
— Rick Yancey, The Last Star
A single poem, alonecan turn tidesscatter galaxiesand burst forth with riversfrom paradise.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
Judge a book by the way you feel after you read the last page.
— B.B. Free
Seeing what someone's reading is like seeing the first derivative of their thinking.
— Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
Few people will understand that to love is like being able to select and read a good book. They don’t just stop at the title or the cover. They stop because...they wanted to read the content. The wanted to read each word, each sentence, each line, but most of all, what was in between the lines...
— lauren klarfeld
The books you read in childhood shape the person you become.
— Paula Berinstein
One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
At both school and at home, I lost myself in books.
— Daniel D. Maurer, Sobriety: A Graphic Novel
I think I might have something for you today," he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold
Fiction was a way for me to escape into another world. I would lose myself and all my shame, insecurity, and fear in those books. I would let time slip away in the pages of other worlds. Reading was a life long gift I grew to cherish.
— Daniel D. Maurer, Sobriety: A Graphic Novel
Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
— Germaine Greer
For a book to be a good one a reader must have a connection with the characters and identify with them and have the story hold their attention and want more
— Brenda Kay Winters, Nurse
It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself - and he never asked anybody else to read to him.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold
This even doesn't worth and one dollar just for reading and viewing it!
— Deyth Banger
when you know that writing your own book of life is so difficult to begin with, the least you can do for someone else, is to try to read the pages of a person rather than skip through the chapters.
— lauren klarfeld
Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)
— Charles Baxter
But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.
— Cecelia Ahern
we became the books we read.
— Matthew Kelly
They take their drama firsthand, in the real world, while I prefer the drama of fictional characters–in worlds where things happen for a reason, where questions are answered, where conflicts are always resolved.
— Kat O'Keeffe
A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez’s novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.
— Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Words will change your future
— Jade
Reading is not like this... read and read without understanding you just want to finish the book... I had such moments but it's the worst decision ever made. The reading should be process in which you go deeper and deeper, you understand it... you like it... you try to be the same character.... you enjoy it and you want more and more... you have more and more curiousity.
— Deyth Banger
We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits...so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'tis then we get the right good from the book.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
Good aims not always make good books.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Watch, how the sunslowly risesfrom behind my earnew lines, new countriesspring up in my palmsmy rough hairbecome swaying silkand all the leavesin my bodybecome lusher than fruits.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
— W.B. Yeats
All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.
— Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer