Quotes About Reading

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

I feel most myself when I'm reading, but by that I don't mean that I'm most comfortable when I'm reading. I feel most fully a person who's torn between attention and inattention, between loving and hating, between hyper-responsiveness and total dullness. Reading is not a comfortable experience for me.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

There are two kinds of reading, reading which is contemplation - even a kind of vision & reading for information. For the first only the best will do, for the rest - then one can let in anything one would like to read in the world.

When you're a kid, you see your parents reading the newspaper and you're like, 'God, why are they reading the newspaper?' When you're young, you're not reading the newspaper. But there comes a time in your life when the newspaper's cool.

You are currently experiencing desire; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading these words. Even if you are reading them at the behest of someone else, you are motivated by your desire to please that person. And if you stop reading, you will not do so because you have stopped desiring but because your desires have changed.

I think I'm still fed by my childhood experience of reading, even though obviously I'm reading many books now and a lot of them are books for children but I feel like childhood reading is this magic window and there's something that you sort of carry for the rest of your life when a book has really changed you as a kid, or affected you, or even made you recognize something about yourself.

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.

Women are better at reading body language everywhere in the world. As a matter of fact, it's associated with the female hormone estrogen. Women are better at figuring out of tone of voice, reading your face and posture and gesture.

There's something touching about a kid who's reading a book that's printed on actual paper. I think that anything that kids start reading, within reason, can lead to other discoveries.

I won’t lie. Walking into a room and seeing your girlfriend reading a baby-name book can kind of make your heart stop. “I’m no expert,” I began, choosing my words carefully. “Well—actually, I am. And I’m pretty sure there are certain things we have to do before you need to be reading that.

But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later.

Reading is professionally important for me to keep tuned in to what's being written in my genre, let's not lie. But that's not the reason I read. I read for my own emotional and mental health. If I stopped reading, I'd probably just die.

There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains -- and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys -- and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.

There's a lot of lies out there that we should catch and that have taken me a lot of time to sort of see, and reading up on it and getting educated on it. I'm reading a book that's about how images of beauty have hurt women along the decades. It's a very educating but infuriating thing to see, how we don't have equal opportunity because they're demanding so much more.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

I do not know whether you are fond of chemical reading. There are some things in this science worth reading.

I will say the most raw joy I've experienced reading has probably come from the times I've been reading with my little boys.

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

But I also think that once you've found stuff that works, stop reading forums, stop reading reviews and just get out there and play.

But, you have to watch them in order. That's very important because, as it turns out, stories have to be told in order. It's like reading a novel. There are times when it's tiring. And then, you get hooked and it's a page-turner, and you really want to keep reading. I do think there will be some fatigue that sets in.

I know not a better rule of reading the Scripture, than to read it through from beginning to end and when we have finished it once, to begin it again. We shall meet with many passages which we can make little improvement of, but not so many in the second reading as in the first, and fewer in the third than in the second: provided we pray to him who has the keys to open our understandings, and to anoint our eyes with His spiritual ointment.

As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you're reading their decision, their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you're reading a good judicial decision.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

P.S. Nothing personal, but I think this journal assignment is a waste of time. I know I have to do something to make up for all the work I'm missing at school, but I HATE busywork. And that's what this journal thing is. Half the teachers at school assign work they never read. When we get stupid assignments like that, I always write somewhere on my paper "blah blah blah" or "I bet you're not even reading this," are you? or "Give me a sign if you're reading this." They never are.

Support your public library! It is a treasure and a legacy that will provide entertainment, information, a sense of community, and real continuity from one generation to the next, and the next after that. So long as we keep reading, and reading to our children, there will be hope for our shared cultural heritage and the future of our world.

What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

I think that my love of cooking grew out of my love of reading about cooking. When I was a kid, we had a bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. I would eat all my meals reading about meals I could have been having.

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

When you're just reading a note card but when you're just reading a note card and it doesn't even feel real, it's difficult at times. But I have no problem doing interviews. So I have absolutely no problem doing interviews.

I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.

People have proven over and over that they will read if they are given something they like. The problem with reading is not reading, its that almost everything out there sucks. For so long, publishing has been run by a cartel of snobby pseudo-intellectual failed writers, and the resulting output has reflected not what the market wants, but what they think people are supposed to read.

You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.