c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A writer who doesn’t read is like a director who doesn’t watch movies.
— Kira  Hawke
Reading enlightens my mind and fills my soul.
— Brenda Kay Winters, Van Halen: The Heavy Metal Band
What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.
— Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman
Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!
— Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman
Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding-- or wanting to admit-- that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.
— Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman
We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little--set time, set gestures-- was like a prayer.
— Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman
Of all the queer sources of romance, ours lay in the discovery that each was an addict of Boswell's Life of Johnson. H.E.G. had a first edition of the Journey to the Hebrides, which I coveted mightily. Why not acquire the book honorably, marry the man, and have it around the house?
— Beatrice Fairfax
Never interrupt someone who is reading because they’re no longer in your world.
— J.A. George, Gifted
The sessions with Mr. Dubois continued, but it was in the private parlor of Abigail Braddock that Sarah Biddle received the greatest knowledge, for in Mrs. Braddock's private parlor Sarah Biddle learned not only to read books, but also to love them.
— Stephanie Grace Whitson, Sarah's Patchwork
How can I survive without a book to read?
— David Hill
And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.
— Lyndsay Faye, Jane Steele
The ceaseless rain is falling fast,And yonder gilded vane,Immovable for three days past,Points to the misty main,It drives me in upon myselfAnd to the fireside gleams,To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,And still more pleasant dreams,I read whatever bards have sungOf lands beyond the sea,And the bright days when I was youngCome thronging back to me.In fancy I can hear againThe Alpine torrent's roar,The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,The sea at Elsinore.I see the convent's gleaming wallRise from its groves of pine,And towers of old cathedrals tall,And castles by the Rhine.I journey on by park and spire,Beneath centennial trees,Through fields with poppies all on fire,And gleams of distant seas.I fear no more the dust and heat,No more I feel fatigue,While journeying with another's feetO'er many a lengthening league.Let others traverse sea and land,And toil through various climes,I turn the world round with my handReading these poets' rhymes.From them I learn whatever liesBeneath each changing zone,And see, when looking with their eyes,Better than with mine own.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I love the paradise of being between the pages of a book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Books are carnival rides for your imagination.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Every book is its own black hole. Don’t fight the pull
—  find out where it takes you.
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
— Fernando Pessoa
I hold a theory that, sooner or later, if a man but live long enough, certain books destined for his peculiar delight will find him, however obscure they or he may be.
— Vincent Starrett, Books and Bipeds
His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ...
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.
— John Erskine
Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow—“all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained—but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in.
— Carolina De Robertis, Perla
Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.
— Theodora Goss, Red as Blood and White as Bone
Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood.
— E.L. Konigsburg, Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups
You'll never get to the happily ever after if you don't move past the current chapter...
— Carmen DeSousa
In unremarkable texts we soon trip on phrases that penetrate into us, as if a sword has thrust up to its hilt inside us.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
— Marilynne Robinson
who gets the rare opportunity of spotting a treasure of memories lying among masses, stepping back to stroke it with a secret smile as your mind wanders back to those sleepless yet ecstatic nights you had spent together?only............a book lover.
— Nadun Lokuliyanage
Whenever we read a book we love, we change it, to some extent. We read into it our own interpretations, and the meanings which the words have taken on in our time. If a book is so rigid that it cannot lend itself to these fluctuations, it is useful only while it seems strictly true, and afterwards it is completely out of date.
— John Erskine, The Delight of Great Books
He had learned how reading a book can take you away from anywhere, and make you feel like you're somewhere else, and someone else.. Even if only for a little while.
— Ava Dianne Day, Cut to the Heart
Reading brings us unknown friends.” — Honoré de Balzac
— Susan Parker Rosen
I read to learn from the greats but I write to compete with them.
— Jazmin Anguiano
We sat in his library. amidst his beloved books, whose company I knew he would rather seek than that of most of his acquaintances, did they but know it.
— Linda Buckley-Archer, Gideon the Cutpurse
I was behind, but now I'm below. Hopefully, they'll have books wherever I go...
— Carmen DeSousa
It really doesn't matter, are you fat or thin, large or small or whatever horrible and ungly and so on and so on..., to don't go so in details because from reading this your day becomes with more insults, my purpose is not to insult you, but to show you the path!I know one all people can be clever if they want to be.
— Deyth Banger
Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.
— Sophie Dash, To Wed a Rebel
Dare to read.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There is no greater companion like books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading the timeless stories strengthen my spirit in times of suffering.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In three months Ron read more than he had in his entire previous life. He felt his mind widen, his perceptions become more acute, for each book was a prism refracting the infinitely varied truths of experience. Some were telescopes; some microscopes.
— Edward Bunker, The Animal Factory
I wish I could fall asleep. But with a good book in my hands, I stay awake to finish reading.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading leads to good conduct
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading promotes confident.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I prefer the skylineof a shelf of books.
— Jim Harrison, Braided Creek
Reading leads to wise ways of living.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.
— Sloan Wilson
We encounter many sacred souls while reading.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The joy of reading is sacred pleasure.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Read. Read.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
A book acts as the getaway car when you need to escape.Even when you're the one writing it.
— Julie Wright
Read. Read until your eyes are sore. Then read some more.
— Lisa Bloom, Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World
Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. “You ever read Hamlet?” he questioned.“I tried to when I was in high school,” said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. “I mean, it’s expected that everyone should like Shakespeare’s books and plays, but I just….” her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. “What’s so funny, Sir?” she added, slightly offended.“…Oh, I’m not laughing at you, just with you,” said the store owner. “Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You’re honest Ma’am, that’s all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things… and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you’ll enjoy them so much more because you’ll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example – Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him.”“…Wow, when you put it that way… sure, I think I’ll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?” Mandy replied with a smile.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
— Ann Patchett
And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
There are few finer or more innocent pleasures than talking books to one who knows. There may be joy in heaven- I am told there is- but the evidence is not conclusive, and I'll take mine here in my library.
— A. Edward Newton, This Book Collecting Game
Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.
— Ann Patchett
Without reading many different books, you can never leave the port of ignorance and can never obtain the peaceful mind of knowing the truth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Don’t you think it’s better to continue reading than to just close the book?
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
Relatable escapism can only be achieved using facets of the real world.
— Kevin Focke
I explore the mind of souls in stories.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I have met many sacred souls in reading.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Because What we Learn from our Favorite Books, you see in our daily Lives.---JennAnijah Publishing
— JennAnijah Publishing
How could I fall asleep, when I love the pleasure of reading and writing at night?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If you read stories, you will learn the valuable lessons of life situations, survival and build strength.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading as an adult, for pleasure, is infinitely better than reading the stuff assigned to you back in school. You get to choose what you want to read.
— Lisa Bloom, Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World
For students of every ability and background, it is the simply miraculous act of reading a good book that turns them into readers. The job of adults who care about reading is to move heaven and earth to put that book into a child's hands.
— Nancy Atwell
If You have a good reading habit, then you become a good thinker
— Muhammad Hassam
Can you imagine life without a book?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
To make the best dicision for a book first check out the title, second check out the cover, third to check out the category what type is it - is it a horror or thriller or it's a psychology - it's important this. Then for sure check out little what's about the book. By openning it and reading the first 3 pages or as much as possible to make your decision!
— Deyth Banger
a good philosopher always have great reading ability.
— Muhammad Hassam
For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.
— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.
— Alice Munro
Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber’s basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? To any extent. For the proof is that we still read the book. It remains highly amusing to us. And that’s finally all anyone wants out of a book—to be amused.
— Paul Auster, City of Glass
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
— Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.
— George Orwell, 1984
Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.
— Charles Bukowski
How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes."These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption--vain because it is endless--and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.
— Lydia Davis
It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book. Also, when I write letters, I spend the next two days thinking about what I figured out in my letters.
— Stephen Chbosky
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
— Lisel Mueller
With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua’s hands. “One of my favorites.
— C.J. Milbrandt, Inside the Tree: A Ewan Johns Adventure
...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went...
— Elena Ferrante
Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
— Kira  Hawke
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. ”― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
— Haruki Murakami
There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.
— James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
I think I'm going through a bit of ADD. I'm reading 3 books simultaneously and it's something that I don't recommend. It's like watching TV with two others who keep changing the channels...
— S.J. Romero
Begin to read.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write a book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The survival spirit
—  either read or write a story.
There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.
— Joe Hill, The Fireman
Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
There's always a person for every book. And a book for every person.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Some books are so special that you never forget where you were the first time you read them.
— Natalie Lloyd, The Key to Extraordinary
Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side…
— Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?
— Sergio Troncoso
I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.
— Isabel Allende, Maya's Notebook
Encourage your children to read more and watch television less.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
A book was mere paper splattered with ink until a reader’s mind gave it life.
— Elizabeth Langston, Whisper Falls
One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.
— Sarah Vowell
People experience books so very differently.
— Amy Neftzger, The War of Words
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
— Patti Smith, M Train
It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.
— Jen Selinsky
President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: "The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
I can't think of too many things as exciting as reading a book for the first time!
— Jen Selinsky
Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.
— Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books
It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!
— Michelle Cuevas, Confessions of an Imaginary Friend
Be calm. Keep reading.
— Tom Cardamone, Night Sweats
If you are brave, you will open the book and read it.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.
— Kellyn Roth, The Dressmaker's Secret
I read nonfiction for information, fiction for truth.
— Michael M. Thomas
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I just prefer my fiction with more teeth.
— Jessica Halleck
In a way, the books were protection. An escape she would always have access to.A sanctuary, there for when she needed it.
— C.M. Spivey, From Under the Mountain
Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.
— Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar
Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.
— Italo Calvino
popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.
— John Leonard, Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008
The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.
— John  Mole, It's All Greek to Me!: A Tale of a Mad Dog and an Englishman, Ruins, Retsina--and Real Greeks
There is no other enjoyment like reading
— Jane Austen
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.
— Jincy Willett
There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.
— Marilynne Robinson
Greatest companion is found in reading great books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I know the mind of ancient souls by reading ancient books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
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 in to 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
Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale.Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.
— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.
— C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
The better the school library, the higher the reading scores.
— Stephen D. Krashen
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings
Cats and books are my universe. Both are infinitely fascinating and full of mystery.
— Rai Aren
I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.
— Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin
The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.
— Nova Ren Suma
It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere
— Karina Cooper, Gilded
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
— A.D. Posey
Library science was the foundation of all sciences.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel
The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.
— Kira  Hawke
The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.
— A.D. Posey
Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.
— A.D. Posey
There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold.
— Alexandr Iscenco
The treasures in my house are books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading sparks writing.
— A.D. Posey
How you feel after reading something indicates not what you’ve read but where you are at.
— A.D. Posey
Reading opens up other pockets of the mind.
— A.D. Posey
You can Save Time with Writing but you can Save a Life by Reading.
— Divya Chawla
Maslow said sex is the primary need. Does that mean pornstars spend more money in books than anyone else?
— Daniel Marques
If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.
— Orhan Pamuk
Mediation on the Scriptures will renew your mind.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A man who reads will find himself.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Books are my greatest treasures.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
The greatest treasures are books.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The greatest adventure is reading!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The best gift, you can give me is a book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Renew your mind daily by reading the Holy Scriptures.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The moon is a loyal companion.It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human.Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.
— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
— Edna O'Brien, In the Forest
Peace comes from within.  Do not seek it without.
— Gautama Buddha
There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
— Swami Vivekananda
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.
— Dalai Lama XIV
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering. 
— Augustine of Hippo
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
— Carlos Castañeda
For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version
Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine. You want to stay near the core of the thing - right in the hub of the wheel - not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness - that's your heart. That's where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.
— Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Some are born virtuous, some become virtuous. To be good by nature is indeed fortunate but to become good is like walking on a double-edged sword; it takes a longer time and is more painful.
— Umera Ahmed
While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.
— Francis of Assisi
do it or don't do it but get on with it...
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Beginnings of Learning
It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.
— Trudi Canavan, The Magicians' Guild
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
— Rabindranath Tagore
Perform all thy actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye. Spirituality implies equanimity.[Trans. Purohit Swami]
— Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
— Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives.
— Ezra Taft Benson
Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.
— Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.
— Bono
This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
— Carlos Castañeda
Some of the most beautiful things worth having in your life come wrapped in a crown of thorns.
— Shannon L. Alder
Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
Abandon hope.
— Pema Chödrön
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them — for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions.
— Dalai Lama XIV
The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed
—  hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.
But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.
— Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
I detach myself from preconceived outcomes and trust that all is well. Being myself allows the wholeness of my unique magnificience to draw me in those directions most beneficial to me and to all others. This is really the only thing I have to do. And within that framework, everything that is truly mine comes into my life effortlessly, in the most magical and unexpected ways imaginable, demonstrating every day the power and love of who I truly am.
— Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing
There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
— Menachem Mendel
Any task in life is easier if we approach it with the one at a time attitude. ... To cite a whimsical saying; 'If you chase two rabbits, both of them will escape.' No one is adequate to do everything all at once. We have to select what is important, what is possible, and begin where we are, with what we have. And if we beginand if we keep going the weight, the worry, the doubt, the depression will begin to lift .... We can't do everything always, but we can do something now, and doing something will help to lift the weight and lessen the worry, 'The beginning,' said Plato, 'is the most important part.
— Richard L. Evans
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
— Alan W. Watts, Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? Because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
— Ramakrishna
An attitude of gratitude brings great things.
— Yogi Bhajan
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
— Dalai Lama XIV
Its easier to feel a little more spiritual with a couple of bucks in your pocket.
— Craig Ferguson
To travel a circle is to journey over the same ground time and time again. To travel a circle wisely is to journey over the same ground for the first time. In this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the circle, a path to where you wish to be. And when you notice at last that the path has circled back into itself, you realize that where you wish to be is where you have already been ... and always were.
— Neale Donald Walsch
Not my will, but thine, be done.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
I believe that the greatest truths of the universe don't lie outside, in the study of the stars and the planets. They lie deep within us, in the magnificence of our heart, mind, and soul. Until we understand what is within, we can't understand what is without.
— Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing
With stillness comes the benediction of Peace.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.
— Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly.
— Krister Stendahl
We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
— Margaret Atwood, The Tent
The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.
— Nikolai A. Berdyaev