c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing
— Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Some read to learn, some to laugh, and some to live.
— Joyce Rachelle
You’re going to turn the next page, because you still have hope. You hope there’s a little something more, and it’s nothing personal. People do it at the end of every book. I think that’s why publishers put in all those extra pages. So you have a chance to shuffle and flip through them while it sinks in. It’s over. The trip is done.You know it’s over, but you’re going to turn the page anyway.
— Rory Harrison, Looking for Group
Oh you cut your hair! What happened? Are you going through a breakup or something?""My favorite character died.
— Joyce Rachelle
Some people just need to read and think, to spend time alone sorting through the stories in their heads
— Ronald T. Potter-Efron
This consists in not taking a book into one’s hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time — such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind
— Arthur Schopenhauer
You can be anywhere you want in the world, meet different people and learn more than a hundred things in a matter of minutes… all you have to do is READ!
— C.M. Okonkwo
The family that reads together grows together!
— Carmela Dutra
What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
— Margaret Atwood
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
The sad thing about reading the book and then watching the movie is that they have to die all over again.
— Joyce Rachelle
I was always the girl growing up who just wasn’t quite like the rest of them. I liked working hard. I liked contorting my body until I could feel the ache inside my bones, until I could feel the pain in my teeth. I liked to wear lipstick and nothing else and found myself fascinated with the shape of my lips and the different colors I could make them. I ate too little. Slept too much. Masturbated far too often and at far too young an age. I enjoyed the feeling of being naked alone behind closed doors, exploring my deepest secrets within my imagination, as I put my hand over the rapid pace of my heart to feel how nervous it made me. I blushed at the faintest mention of my name and almost perished when complimented. I loved to find the answers behind someone’s eyes. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of when someone REALLY looks at you. And I read. Every chance I got.
— R.B. O'Brien
If you love the backs of cereal boxes or still recall how much you loved the Archie comics, share all that with your child. Ingesting words, like fruit and vegetables, is just plain good for us, no matter where they are coming from.
— Pam Allyn, What to Read When: The Books and Stories to Read with Your Child--and All the Best Times to Read Them
Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.
— Lionel Shriver, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed—all I have ever needed—was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.
— Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
On the one hand we need the image of "the text" in order to focus on anything at all; on the other hand we use the metaphor of "reading" to signal that our apprehension of a text will always be partial, that we never quite reach the "text itself," a realization that has led certain critics to question the very existence of such an object.
— Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.
— Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use. "—George A. Dorsey, anthropologist
— Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now
YOU’RE READING. That’s what the sexy people do.
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
I read so I can enjoy my life and another.
— A.K.Yasmine
Those who do not read are at the mercy of those who do.
— Shelley A. Ashcroft
It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.
— T.S. Eliot
Stephen King is not a guy who keeps secrets the same goes and for Jeffery Deaver. But Jeffery Deaver creates characters and plays with them, Stephen King knows with who is playing, Jeffery Deaver just goes as how will happen, I think that and he doesn't know where the story lines will go.
— Deyth Banger
Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life.
— Fran Lebowitz
A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors’ collective and collaborative minds at work.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
To read is to truly escape from oneself
— R.L Middleton
The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
And remember also that when we seek to learn from nature directly, our ultimate aim is to understand the world in which we live. We neither agree nor disagree with nature as we often do in the case of books.
— Adler Mortimer
I read. That's my form of travel.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Between the pages of a book is a lovely place to be
— Unknown
People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.
— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
What must not be read must not be written
— Melita Tessy, Battle of the Spheres: Crust, Mantle and Core
What must not be read must not be written.
— Melita Tessy, Battle of the Spheres: Crust, Mantle and Core
A person can escape an ingrained pattern of mental incapacity or ‘non compos mentis’ (“no power of the mind”) by reading, writing, thinking, and studying their environment for telling external determinates that will shape a journey of the mind, body, and soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.
— Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life
Students didn't even read books anymore, thought Arthur. They dispensed with design and layout and cover art and illustrations and reduced reading to nothing but a stream of text in whatever font and size they chose. Reading without books, thought Arthur, was like playing cricket without dressing in white. It could be done, but why?
— Charlie Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail
If we don’t live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors’ reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the “who is who”, the “what is what” and the “where is Waldo”, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ("Fish for silence.")
— Erik Pevernagie
Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
When I want somebody to read to, To match a dream with tuneful phrase,It is my nurse that I pay heed to,Companion of my youthful days,Or, following a boring dinner,A neihbour comes in, who I corner,Catch at his coat tails suddenlyAnd choke him with a tragedy,Or, (here I am no longer jesting),Haunted by rhymes and yearning's ache,I roam beside my country lakeAnd scare a flock of wild ducks resting:Hearing my strophes' sweet-toned chants,They fly off from the banks at once.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
You know the people," said Pamela, "who say, 'Of course I love reading, but I've no time, alas!' as if everyone who loves reading doesn't make time.
— O. Douglas, Penny Plain
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.
— Neil Gaiman
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity one has to meet every day.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
You know how there are words that never really—they are never really quite right. You can't quite trust them. Use them. You know. Without p
— Emma Richler, Be My Wolff
Reading is almost always subversive. From the time you read the next night's fairy tale under the covers by flashlight when you have already had your bedtime story from Daddy and are supposed to be asleep to the time you are an adult reading junk, hoping no one catches you at it, reading is private; that's the most seductive thing about it. It's you and the book.
— Phyllis Rose, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
...but there was never enough time to read. The great irony of working in a library.
— Jan Louch, The True Tails of Baker and Taylor: The Library Cats Who Left Their Pawprints on a Small Town . . . and the World
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it
— Elmore Leonard
I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
— Robert Graves, I, Claudius
If someone doesn't understand the importance of sensitivity readers, chances are they may need them the most...
— Kira  Hawke
Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experience, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as you see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don't have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.
— Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015
Reading and naps, two of life's greatest pleasures, go especially well together.
— Will Schwalbe, Books for Living
I only know how to read because I steal books from rich people.
— Natalie C. Anderson, City of Saints & Thieves
Jack thought anyone who read couldn't be all that bad.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
...I used to think if you read enough books you'd automatically know how to do everything the right way. But reading and doing are not the same at all.
— Judy Blume, Forever . . .
From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...
— Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.
— Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
— Bret Easton Ellis
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
— Bret Easton Ellis
...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...
— Stephen King, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
His reading aloud was constantly improving, and histories were more like radio plays. Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day grow up to need reading, with an accompanying sense of wonder and the feeling of having a film running inside your head, as much as they needed air to breathe.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
The books I read when I was twenty completely changed when I read them when I was sixty.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, a window.
— Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year
Every book was a door
—  every page a new place to hide.
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau
A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.
— Pawan Mishra
Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.
— Pawan Mishra
Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.
— Pawan Mishra
Don’t break the rules when you haven’t fully figured them out yet.
— Pawan Mishra
[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture…
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy: And Other Posthumous Papers
Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.
— Pawan Mishra
The good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.
— Pawan Mishra
Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.
— Pawan Mishra
A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.
— Pawan Mishra
Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.
— Pawan Mishra
Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.
— Pawan Mishra
If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.
— Pawan Mishra
As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.
— Pawan Mishra
Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.
— Pawan Mishra
Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.
— Pawan Mishra
A book is just as magical to write as it is to read, it takes you on a journey that changes you in the end.
— Jen Golembiewski
If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.
— Pawan Mishra
A book can be a great friend, an advisor, a means to an end. A book reveals so much more than a movie would ever do. For example, when I watched the movie “The Hours” I was fascinated by the story. Just a year later I decided to read the book. And what was my surprise that I was even more dazzled by its writings than I was by the images… The images in my head were more vivid than the film could ever transport me to that feminine universe that the author was trying (and so successfully granted me) to conceive…
— Ana Claudia Antunes
Learn to read and a whole new world will open up to you.
— O.E. Boroni, The Man Who Won the World
If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.
— Pawan Mishra
Sacred actions: gratitude, praying, dancing, hugging, singing, writing, painting, drawing, gardening, jogging, reading, knitting and many more!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.
— Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.
— Marc Bolan
The look you get when you’re reading in your van, and your feet are up and you sit so still, and your face is alight, and I don’t know where you are; you could be anywhere, so far away, off in a part of your mind I’ll never get to . . . It drives me crazy. The way you just came here, just got up, changed your entire life . . . I mean, my family’s been here for four generations. It would never have occurred to me to do what you did, just to start over and do something different. Amazing.
— Jenny Colgan, The Bookshop on the Corner
But I love you, and before you say it words do matter. They're not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history and they wouldn't be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn't listen to songs, we wouldn't beg to be read to when we're kids. If they were just words, then they'd have no meaning and stories wouldn't have been around since before humans could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words then people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, stop aching because of them, have sex, quite a lot of the time, because of them.
— Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue
Books are a portable kind of time travel. We go back as well as forward when we read them. When we come back into the now, after being immersed in worlds previously unknown to us, we find ourselves, transformed. Touched by their magic, nothing we ever perceived beforehand remains quite the same.
— Suzy  Davies
She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.
— Zadie Smith, Swing Time
When someone tells me to 'just relax,' I wonder why they don’t hand me a book?
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading.
— Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory
Every book begins and ends with other people- the readers who suggest the book to us and encourage us to read it, the talented author who crafted each word, the fascinating individuals we meet inside the pages- and the readers we discuss and share the book with when we finish.
— Donalyn Miller, Reading in the Wild
I am going to build a fortress of books.Will you come inside and live with me?
— Kamand Kojouri
...a library is not just a reference service: it is also a place for the vulnerable. From the elderly gentleman whose only remaining human interaction is with library staff, to the isolated young mother who relishes the support and friendship that grows from a Baby Rhyme Time session, to a slow moving 30-something woman collecting her CDs, libraries are a haven in a world where community services are being ground down to nothing. I've always known libraries are vital, but now I understand that their worth cannot be measured in books alone.
— Angela Clarke
The author & the reader "know" each other: they meet on the bridge of words
— Madeleine L'Engle
Unlike music, excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind. It was taught in our earliest lectures: the male cells are essentially katabolic: active energetic; and female cells are anabolic: there to conserve energy and support life. While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature.
— Anna Hope, The Ballroom
I just want to read and ignore all my adult problems.
— Unknown
A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person.
— Sergio Troncoso
Never underestimate the power of giving a book!
— Carmela Dutra
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
I don't read books to finish them, I read to consume them.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
— C.S. Lewis
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.
— John Updike, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories
I love the pleasure of reading poetry.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If rewriting equals rereading, we must logically conclude that writing is reading. If this is indeed the case, how could we possibly write under a ban on reading? The only way left is mouth-to-mouth – poets and storytellers recite their pieces and before we can commit them to memory, everything vanishes into thin air.
— Kyoko Yoshida
He came to read; two or three booksare lying open: history and poetry.But after just ten minutes of readinghe lets them drop. There on the sofahe falls asleep. He truly is devoted to reading-but he is twenty-three years old, and very handsome.And just this afternoon, Eros surged within his perfect limbs and on his lips.Into his beautiful flesh came the heat of passion, and there was no foolish embarrassment about the form that pleasure took..
— C.P Cavafy
When someone recommends a book to you, you know two things; that it is a good book and you have a good friend.
— Min Kim
You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Books are where the true magic happens.
— Jen Wilde
Books are the best companions. They talk to you when you want them and they stop when you want them…They ask no questions, and want no favours.
— S. Satyamurti
Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.
— Marisha Pessl
We're too practical, I guess. You've got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books
— Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Nightmares have a dreadful effect of captivating our minds during the waking hours. Nevertheless, they are merely fiction.
— Erin Forbes, Fire & Ice: The Elementals
That was his favorite thing about books—they took you off to other people’s lives an’ places, but you could still set in your own chair by th’oil heater, warm as a mouse in a churn.
— Jan Karon, Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good
Reading is an escape people use in order to get away from reality. It is a chance to be free and explore who you are.
— McKenna Pickett
I found that reading gave me a certain relief – one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner – less fragmented- after reading for an hour.location 3234
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.
— Henry James, Watch and Ward
It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it.
— Henry James, Watch and Ward
It takes all sorts to make a world,” some are soldiers from the cradle, some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the gift given to me by the fairies.
— Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books
When an ignorant reads ignorant things or when he comes together with other ignorant, his ignorance will deepen and his fate will worsen!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You can never have too many books or too many hugs.
— Gina House
You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes you'll feel you're speaking for it, sometimes -- when it's taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak 'for women,' or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you'll end up two-dimensional."Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
— Margaret Atwood
Being able to read a book in another language is a source of ego-stroking pride.
— Emily O’Beirne, A Story of Now
...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)
— Erik Pevernagie
I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
— Nikita Gill, Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments
Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.
— Alice Hoffman, Faithful
Zoe did what civilized people do when they freak out: she drank tea. She had walked from her little bungalow to Coffee & Tea. It was always filled with the well-educated, the complicated, the people who read books with captivating titles. A perfect place to ignore and be ignored. She found the anonymity delicious.
— Michael Benzehabe
It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
With a book he was regardless of time...
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Fiction books give the reader a chance to step away from their own reality and into the shoes of the characters, and they show you a world that isn't the one you already know. And sometimes the story's not so different from your own, and it lets you get closer to your own feelings.
— Shin Towada
Reading is important. It’s not primarily escapism (though it can be, and there’s nothing wrong with some of that in good measure) and it’s not primarily a way of passing the time. Reading is important to the good life because it stokes the furnaces of our intellect, allows us to expand our understanding of the universe, both inner and outer, for practical gain and simple pleasure. It can induce awe, inspire respect, excite, piss off, and intrigue. These are things that make life worth living.
— Robert Wringham, Escape Everything!: Escape From Work. Escape From Consumerism. Escape From Despair.
Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.
— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
The synopsis looked good, the cover looked nice, you opened the book and began a new life. You found a new home,  you met some new friends, you kept on reading, hoping it ould never end. You danced through the pages, you sang out the words you felt all their joy, and all their pain and hurt. The pages cut your fingers, and the words cut your heart, like the author had a knife,  and was tearing your soul apart. You laughed with the characters, and with them, you cried, you fell in love with them, too but with them, you died, and when the book reached its end, and your broken heart couldn't heal, you suddenly realized that  its not  real.
— Anonymous
Jessie reached for 'Ten Bright Ideas to Light Up Your Sales'. It was on her bedside table, right next to 'Charlotte's Web'. Jessie's hand hovered. She looked longingly at Wilbur and Fern watching Charlotte hanging b a thread.But this was war, and she couldn't stop to read for fun.
— Jacqueline Davies, The Lemonade War
A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.
— Harlan Ellison
The synopsis looked good,the cover looked nice,you opened the book,and began a new life.You found a new home,you met some new friends,you kept on reading,hoping it would never end.You danced through the pages,you sang out the words,you felt all their joy,and all their pain and hurt.The pages cut your fingers,the words cut your heart,like the author had a knife,and was tearing your soul apart.You laughed with the characters,and with them you cried,you fell in love with them, too,and with them you died,and when the book reached its end,and your broken heart couldn't heal,you suddenly realized that It's not real
— Unknown
That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
— Olaf Stapledon, A Man Divided
Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer’s use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader’s malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books.
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
There were two girls in a room. They were reading a book… Look again, and the room is empty. The end of the story will have to wait.
— Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories
When you read,' the man whispered, 'you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
— Malcolm McNeill
Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
— Alexander Chee
One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits and profitably employed would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science. One hour a day would in ten years make an ignorant man a well-informed man…In an hour a day, a boy or girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully—over seven thousand pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year. An hour a day might make all the difference between bare existence and useful, happy living. An hour a day might make—nay, has made—an unknown man a famous one, a useless man a benefactor to his race.
— Orison Swett Marden
Sit here, so I may writeyou into a poem and make you eternal.
— Kamand Kojouri
Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Books need to have their spines cracked, their covers opened, and their pages ruffled for them to come alive.
— Chris Grabenstein, Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Books may not judge you, but people do.
— Natasha Farrant, The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet
Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
— Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka
You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
I don't trust people without books or questions.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had!
— Avijeet Das
For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something — distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world — but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before.
— Kamand Kojouri
No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.
— Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.----Alcuni libri devono essere gustati, altri masticati e digeriti, vale a dire che alcuni libri vanno letti solo in parte, altri senza curiosità, e altri per intero, con diligenza ed attenzione. Alcuni libri possono essere letti da altri e se ne possono fare degli estratti, ma ciò riguarderebbe solo argomenti di scarsa importanza o di libri secondari perché altrimenti i libri sintetizzati sono come l’acqua distillata, evanescente. La lettura completa la formazione di un uomo; il parlare lo fa abile, e la scrittura lo trasforma in un uomo preciso. E, pertanto, se un uomo scrive poco, deve avere una grande memoria, se parla poco ha bisogno di uno spirito arguto; se legge poco deve avere bisogno di molta astuzia in modo da far sembrare di sapere quello che non sa. Le storie fanno gli uomini saggi; i poeti arguti; la matematica sottile; la filosofia naturale profondi; la logica e la retorica abili nella discussione.
— Bacon Francis 1561-1626 Francis
Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
— Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings
Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
— Irvine Welsh, Skagboys
A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
— Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka
I like to share my thoughts after watching/reading or listening to something... after all you could get with amazing thoughts.
— Deyth Banger
When you read," the man whispered, "you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn't know were there.
— Malcom McNeill