c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.
— Bill Hicks
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
— John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn
When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.
— Rita Mae Brown
For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.
— Audrey Hepburn
If we could follow the slogan that says,"Turn off the TV and open a good book" we would do something of substance for a future generation.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.
— Lloyd Alexander
Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.
— Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
— Geraldine Brooks, March
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
— Mortimer J. Adler
Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Tris: "I was reading." Sandry: "You're always reading. The only way people can ever talk to you is to interrupt." Tris: "Then maybe they shouldn't talk to me.
— Tamora Pierce, Briar's Book
It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book...from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
— John Waters, Role Models
A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
— David Mitchell, number9dream
But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...
— Vladimir Nabokov
One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.
— Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Reading... a vacation for the mind....
— Dave Barry
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
— Iain Banks
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
— Henry Miller
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
— Lawrence Durrell
I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I'm trying to give a little of it back to others. It's one of the greatest pleasures I know.
— Ann M. Martin
I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.
— Sara Raasch, Snow Like Ashes
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
— T.S. Eliot
Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes And Lectures Upon Shakespeare And Some Of The Old Poets And Dramatists
Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.
— Jonathan Ames
I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
— Warren Buffett
[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.
— Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword
We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book
—  we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
— Bill Gates
People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.
— Julie Rugg, A Book Addict's Treasury
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
The peace of God is with them whose mind and soul are in harmony, who are free from desire and wrath, who know their own soul.
— Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita
And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
— Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don't care for spill orange soda all over themselves.
— Lemony Snicket
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
— Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
— Francis Bacon
What a blessing it is to love books.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.
— Lisa McMann, Wake
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
— J.K. Rowling
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
— Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
She had her addictions and one of them was reading.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
I'm not a stranger," I said, and pointed to his book. "I'm someone who reads the same authors you do.
— Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
— Malcolm X
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
— Adrienne Rich
Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
— China Miéville
I do not read a book
—  I hold a conversation with the author.
Books, I found, had the power to make timestand still, retreat or fly into the future.
— Jim Bishop
We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.
— Anne Bishop, Daughter of the Blood
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
— Orson Scott Card
His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks."Required reading," I say."It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books.
— Victoria Schwab, The Archived
School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.
— Ambeth R. Ocampo
I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.
— Walter Tevis, Mockingbird
It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
— S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
— W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.
— Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
Tucking my nose into a book makes me completely oblivious to my surroundings. I would have made a terrible spy in the army--the first person to hand me a novel would have been able to shoot my head clean off without me noticing.
— Alyxandra Harvey, Haunting Violet
You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.
— Joseph Delaney, Night of the Soul Stealer
I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books
—  they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace. 
— Voltaire
In reading we must become creators.
— Madeleine L'Engle
See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.
— Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere
Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.
— Atwood H. Townsend, Good Reading
If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
— Sherman Alexie
Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful
— Isaac Asimov
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
— Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
— Iris Murdoch
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him
—  for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
— Ezra Pound
If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.
— George Gordon Byron
Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.
— Richelle Mead, The Golden Lily
You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.
— Paul Rand
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. 
— Pat Conroy
Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.
— Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books
the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
— William Godwin
I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
— Emma Watson
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
— Susan Sontag
The Babar the Elephant book is sitting in front of me. I pick it up and start reading it. I remember reading it as a small Boy and enjoying it and imagining that I was friends with Babar, his constant Companion during all of his adventures. He went to the moon, I went with him. He fought Tomb Raiders in Egypt, I fought alongside him. He rescued his elephant girlfriend from Ivory Hunters on the Savanna, I coordinated the getaway. I loved that goddamn Elephant and I loved being his friend. In a childhood full of unhappiness and rage, Babar is one of the few pleasant memories that I have. Me and Babar, kicking some motherfucking ass.
— James Frey
Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.
— Tom Bissell
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis
..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic.
— Martha V. Parravano
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
— John Dunning, The Bookman's Wake
The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.
— Eric Ripert
What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.
— Mark Vonnegut
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
— Margaret Atwood
She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
— Bruno Bettelheim
She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
— Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.
— Ali Smith, Autumn
I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!
— Jennifer Donnelly
My idea of a fun night was diving into a massive pile of To Be Read pile of books stacked near my dresser... I was the girl who loved everything geeky.
— Jeff Sampson, Vesper
My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
— Edward Gibbon
Guess I’ve been reading too much fantasy.
— Aprilynne Pike
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
— Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
— Peter Ustinov
But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.
— Matt de la Pena, We Were Here
Sister Ignatius taught me in Sunday School that "in the beginning there was light," but to me, it was always an incomplete sentence, which God should have known to ammend: in the beginning God created light...to read by.
— Lorna Landvik, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.
— James Patterson, The Christmas Wedding
Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.
— Richard Carlson, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens: Simple Ways to Keep Your Cool in Stressful Times
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
— Vladimir Nabokov
If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.
— Montesquieu
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Readers are plentiful
—  thinkers are rare.
Reading is a dialog with oneself; it is self-reflection, which cultivates profound humanity. Reading is therefore essential to our development. It expands and enriches the personality like a seed that germinates after a long time and sends forth many blossom-laden branches.People who can say of a book, 'this changed my life' truly understand the meaning of happiness. Reading that sparks inner revolution is desperately needed to escape drowning in the rapidly advancing information society. Reading is more than intellectual ornamentation; it is a battle for the establishment for the self, a ceaseless challenge that keeps us young and vigorous.
— Daisaku Ikeda
Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.
— Anna Godbersen, The Luxe
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.
— Kathryn Magendie, Sweetie
When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.
— Kathleen Norris
Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
— A.L. Kennedy
When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
— Christopher Morley
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.
— S. Weir Mitchell
Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.
— David McCullough Jr.
Aw, fudge,' floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. 'You're a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?'I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. 'After five hundred years, you've read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.
— Karen Chance
Most of my reading is rereading.
— Susan Sontag, Conversations with Susan Sontag
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. 
— Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings
So much of one's life was spent reading
—  it made sense not to do it alone.
A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.
— Walter Mosley, The Long Fall
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
— Thomas Wolfe
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
— Werner Herzog
...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.
— Nora Roberts, Key of Knowledge
Reading is a staple of life, like bread or water. Or chocolate.
— Rett MacPherson, A Misty Mourning
Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word.
— Nina Bernstein
When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be-not here - Just Jane (Chapter Four Page 35)
— Nancy Moser, Just Jane
She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.
— May  Sinclair
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.
— Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
— W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book
Reading is an addiction that I adore.
— Vianka Van Bokkem, Elina Jensen's Double Curse
Go to hell, I'm reading!
— Archie Goodwin
Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom. 
— Tom Bissell
I shudder to think of an eternity spend without books. I have hopes that every book that was ever lost is somewhere waiting for me when my life here finally ends.
— Mel Odom, The Quest for the Trilogy: A Rover Novel of Three Adventures
Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseperable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from - from ignorance, oppression, poverty - and freedom to - to do new things, to make choices, to learn.
— Koichiro Matsuura
As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains...
— Marcel Proust
How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.
— Elizabeth Hardwick
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
— Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf
A book is not completed till it's read.
— Salman Rushdie
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
— Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.
— Hugo Chávez
I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be insid
— Patrick Ness
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov
She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.
— Michelle   Cooper, The FitzOsbornes at War
This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?
— John Green
Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.
— Lemony Snicket, The Miserable Mill
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
— Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. 
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Reading to small children is a specialty.
— Clifton Fadiman, Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader
He always thinks because I'm reading, I'm not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.
— Pierce Brown, Golden Son
I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Them when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team.
— Karen Witemeyer
Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.
— Janette Rallison, My Unfair Godmother
Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
It had always fascinated him that she'd consumed so many words, that her head was full of stories, told a thousand different ways.
— Sarah Addison Allen
I did realize, as do you, how blessed I was to know bookjoy, the private pleasure of savoring text.
— Pat Mora
Reading is dreaming with open eyes
— YoYo
You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.
— Tim Gunn, Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work
...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-
— A.E. Housman, Selected Prose
You can never be wise unless you love reading.
— Samuel Johnson, Life of Johnson, Vol 4
A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
— Ann Patchett
Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances
— Robert E. Lee
Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.
— Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Books are absent teachers.
— Mortimer J. Adler
Plans make dreams reality.
— Susan Pace-Koch, Get Out Of My Head, I Should Go To Bed
I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.
— Marisa de los Santos, Belong to Me
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
— Hilary Mantel
I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.
— Katherine Hannigan, Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World