c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
— Kathy Acker
The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
— Thomas Mann
There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.
— James Patterson
We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature
I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'Why do you read then?'Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times. ...
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
— Wilkie Collins, My Miscellanies
It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.
— Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?
— Patti Digh, Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally
There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...
— Moïra Fowley-Doyle, The Accident Season
I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.
— Edgar Watson Howe
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— Francis Bacon, The Essays
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public. 
— Ayn Rand
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.
— Nick Hornby, More Baths, Less Talking
At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.
— Tasha Alexander, And Only to Deceive
Reading is more important than writing.
— Roberto Bolaño, The Last Interview and Other Conversations
I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.
— William Hope Hodgson
It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.
— Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
A blessed companion is a book--a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend...a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into your own.
— Douglas William Jerrold
We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award
— Kate DiCamillo
You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
What's cheaper than a gallon of gas? An ebook. Save a dollar, stay home and read!
— Shandy L. Kurth
Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.
— Jo Walton
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading every day keeps the brain dead sickness away.
— Kristy Pellegrin
Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal!
— Dick Meyer, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. (1952)
— Mary Ellen Chase
Fiction is life by design.
— Mary Kittredge
Reading is an activity of civilized beings.
— Toba Beta
You may have tangible wealth untold
—  caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me.
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
— John Steinbeck
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
My eyes hunger to read more books then time allows me to devour.
— Jazz Feylynn
I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.
— Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawingup at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.
— Jane Austen, Emma
With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.
— Aldous Huxley
And all you can do is just read," she said. She raised her voice an screamed, "You just read and read and read!" Then she threw herself down on the table and wept.
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
Reading words puts them in your mind. You never forget. Even when you don't get a chance to dwell on the music, you can hear it in your head.
— Carolyn Davidson
Louis said, "There ought to be a comic book about geeks."Dr. McNaughton said, "There are books about geeks."He said, "There are?"Dr. McNaughton said, "I'll read you some Faulkner sometime. I'll read you some Eudora Welty, some Flannery O'Connor. Geeks, midgets, anything your heart desires. Better than comic books."Louis looked at his father. He said, "You'll read to me? Really?
— Lewis Nordan, The Sharpshooter Blues
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
— Anne Fadiman, Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love
How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
— Harold Bloom
Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.
— Heather King, Parched: A Memoir
I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.
— Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook
The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.
— Mitch Albom
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Barrett 1845-1846 Vol I
Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.
— Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.
— Joan Lingard
Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.
— Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
I pity the people who don't like to read, because then they spend their whole lives stuck in this one world and dont get to discover any others.
— Richard P. Denney
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
In some literature, I’ve read, weather is used as a metaphor. The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away all the blood in the streets and the world is clean and new again, as if all the violence and destruction of the storm served a divine purpose.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.
— John Fowles, The Magus
The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.
— Isaac D'Israeli
I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.
— Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine.
— Sanhita Baruah
One reads so as not to believe everything one reads.
— Aaron Haspel
How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”“Spoken like one who has never known the ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.
— Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters
From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
— Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Give yourself to reading.’... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
they should let some people into the library by prescription only
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
— Milan Kundera, Encounter
If you read a story that really involves you, your body will tell you that you are living through the experience. You will recognize feelings that have physical signs - increased heart rate, sweaty palms, or calm, relaxed breathing and so on, depending on your mood. These effects are the same you would feel in similar real-life experiences - fear, anger, interest, joy, shame or sadness. Amazingly, you can actually 'live' experience without moving anything but your eyes across a page.
— Joseph Gold, Read for Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System
I love reading I know it’s very important and I respect anyone that is patient enough to do it.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
— Blaise Pascal
Reading isn't an occupation we encourage among police officers. We try to keep the paperwork down to a minimum.
— Joe Orton, Loot
I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another reading while eating.
— Amanda Filipacchi, Nude Men
God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be. 
— J.D. Salinger
We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.
— Storm Jameson
Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class.
— Stephen King, Just After Sunset
I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark. 
— Steve Wright
A good story defies the reader's expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction.
— Thomas Maltman
Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power. 
— Michael Foot
To be a devout reader was to be an acolyte of solace.
— Tanya Egan Gibson
You'll get younger not from what you read but from what you apply in your life. (192)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie
— Anita Silvey, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book
He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world to enter, that of THE MONK. He had studied the book with great care and finally selected a passage that was purely descriptive.The result was the same. The instant he closed the top of the showcase, he was transported to the world described in the open pages. He found himself standing - and shivering - in a dank corridor that, he knew, was far underground. Feeble candlelight flickered in the distance, off to his left. Water dripped down the gleaming walls and startled rats scurried past his feet. The air was stale and unpleasant. Down the corridor to his left, he could hear singing but could not make out the words. Then suddenly, from his right, he heard a woman's high-pitched scream, its sound caroming off the wet, stone walls of the passageway. He jumped, his skin crawling at the back of his neck.And found himself back in his warm and familiar room.("I Shall Not Leave England Now")
— Alan Ryan, Shadows 7
A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.
— E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
— M.H. Abrams
To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.
— Charles Harrington Elster
Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.
— Annie Murphy Paul
How can you not love reading? It's wonderful. An excursion, an adventure... an escape from reality.' She adored reading and had a hard time grasping anyone not loving it.
— Robin Caroll, Injustice For All
I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.
— Nick Hornby, More Baths, Less Talking
Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teachers Told Me. It'll do your mind good and get your heart rate up.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has become the secret friend of their author.
— Katherine Mansfield
There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it
— Kathy Acker
People don't read anymore. And, when they do, they don't read books like this one, but instead read books that depress them, because those books are seen as important. Somehow, the Librarians have successfully managed to convince most people in the Hushlands that they shouldn't read anything that isn't boring.It comes down to Biblioden the Scrivener's great vision for the world — a vision in which people never do anything abnormal, never dream, and never experience anything strange. His minions teach people to stop reading fun books, and instead focus on fantasy novels. That's what I call them, because these books keep people trapped. Keep them inside the nice little fantasy that they consider to be the 'real' world. A fantasy that tells them they don't need to try something new.After all, trying new things can be difficult.
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones
Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.
— John Green
Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between he individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came to adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
In the words of Agatha Swanburne, founder of Swanburne Academy, "Every book is judged by its cover until it is read.
— Maryrose Wood
I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.
— Janice Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.
— Raymond A. Mar
God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.
— Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker
It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather's Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I'd be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Fever 1793
People do not read stupidities with impunity.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.
— Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
When getting my nose in a bookCured most things short of school,It was worth ruining my eyesTo know I could still keep cool,And deal out the old right hookTo dirty dogs twice my size.Later, with inch-thick specs,Evil was just my lark:Me and my coat and fangsHad ripping times in the dark.The women I clubbed with sex!I broke them up like meringues.Don't read much now: the dudeWho lets the girl down beforeThe hero arrives, the chapWho's yellow and keeps the storeSeem far too familiar. Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.(A Study Of Reading Habits) 
— Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
— Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison
— Sean Liburd
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
We profit little by books we do not enjoy.
— John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life
What are we after when we open one of those books? What is it that makes a classic a classic? ... in old-fashioned terms, the answer is that it wll elevate your spirit. And that's why I can't take much stock in the idea of going through a list of books or 'covering' a fixed number of selections, or anyway striving for the blessed state of having read this, or the other. Having read a book means nothing. Reading a book may be the most tremendous experience of your life; having read it is an item in your memory, part of your receding past... Why we have that odd faith in the magic of having read a book, I don't know. We don't apply the same principle elsewhere: We don't believe in having heard Mendelssohn's violin concerto...I say, don't read the classics -- try to discover your own classics; every life has its own.
— Rudolf Flesch, How to Make Sense
In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?
— Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.
— Jean Giono, An Italian Journey
I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
— Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.
— Walter Mosley, The Best American Short Stories 2003
I wanna say something that I want you to remember for the rest of your life, OK? I want you to listen closely. I'm giving you a key to life right now, this is the key to life. The key to life, the key to life is running and reading. Oh right? Now listen very seriously, the key to life is running and reading. Right now, why running? When you're running and you are there and you're running there's a little person that talks to you and that little person says "Oh, I'm tired", "My lounge's about to pop", "I'm so hurt", "I'm so tired", "There's no way I can possibly continue". And you wanna quit. Right? That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you're running you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life. Running. Oh right? That's the first key to life. Reading. The reason the reading is so important. There've been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you can have with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything, there's no problem you can have that someone hasn't already solved and wrote about it in a book. So they keys to life are running and reading.
— Will Smith
I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, on who is half hacker, half bard. 
— Janet H. Murray
The way a book is read- which is to say,the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
— Norman Cousins
I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he’s old enough to read it.
— John Waters
I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
Read not to contradict and confute
—  nor to believe and take for granted
Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.
— Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
— Steven Heighton
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
— Neil Gaiman
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!
— Italo Calvino
Look for the copper tablet-box,Undo its bronze lock,Open the door to its secret,Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read it,The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.
— Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!"How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Diary of Lady Murasaki
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.
— F.R. Leavis
The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.
— Eric Burns, The Joy of Books
When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves the most pity?" Each of the guests responded, but the answer that is still remembered is Benjamin Franklins's: "A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read.
— Paul Kropp, How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life
The endless piles of genre fiction are the key to happiness. They’re the key to picking out the things that actually make you happy in this world instead of the things that you’re told are good for you. Ninety percent of everything you read is going to be crap one way or the other, so make sure it’s the crap that makes you smile, and don’t apologize for it.pajiba.com guest post
— Steven Lloyd Wilson
Life is obsession and so is reading :D
— Rukamanee Maharjan
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
— Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
— Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
Baba Yaga: "... What are his powers"Mirror on the wall: "He reads
— Bill Willingham
A classroom atmosphere that promotes reading does not come from the furniture and its placement as much as it comes from the teacher's expectation that students will read.
— Donalyn Miller
It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
— William Faulkner, Light in August
If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.
— S.X. Rosenstock, The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, ... Else in the World Since 1953
I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.
— Tom Perrotta
What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
— Horace Mann
I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.)
— Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
It would be difficult to define the limits of his reading.
— Blanche E.C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour V1: First Earl of Balfour 1848-1905
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
— Edith Wharton
THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLYis not silent, it is a speaking-out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*,a voice is *saying* itas you read. It's the writer's words,of course, in a literary sensehis or her "voice" but the soundof that voice is the sound of *your* voice.Not the sound your friends knowor the sound of a tape played backbut your voicecaught in the dark cathedralof your skull, your voice heardby an internal ear informed by internal abstractsand what you know by feeling,having felt. It is your voicesaying, for example, the word "barn"that the writer wrotebut the "barn" you sayis a barn you know or knew. The voicein your head, speaking as you read,never says anything neutrally- some peoplehated the barn they knew,some people love the barn they knowso you hear the word loadedand a sensory constellationis lit: horse-gnawed stalls,hayloft, black heat tape wrappinga water pipe, a slipperyspilled *chirr* of oats from a split sack,the bony, filthy haunches of cows...And "barn" is only a noun- no verbor subject has entered into the sentence yet!The voice you hear when you read to yourselfis the clearest voice: you speak itspeaking to you. ~~-Thomas Lux
— Thomas Lux
Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and "reading material." The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.
— Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower Of Babel And Other Affronts By The Underground Grammarian
Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.
— Jonathan D. Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man
The notions of a young man of one or two and twenty,' said he, 'as to what is necessary in manners to make him quite the thing, are more absurd, I believe, than those of any other set of beings in the world. The folly of the means they often employ is only to be equalled by the folly of what they have in view.
— Jane Austen
You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be -I had a mother who read to me
— Strickland W. Gillilan
If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.
— Arthur Quiller-Couch
I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being
— LeVar Burton
Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
— Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.
— Jennie Chancey
It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.
— Larry Niven, Scatterbrain