READING QUOTES II
quotations about reading
Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.
DIANE DUANE
So You Want to Be a Wizard
The foolish read to escape reality; the wise surrender to it.
TOM HEEHLER
The Well-Spoken Thesaurus
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Thinking for Oneself", Parerga und Paralipomena
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Mezzanine
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Mlle de Chantepie, June 1857
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
JAMES BALDWIN
Life Magazine, May 24, 1963
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Regained
Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share.
GREGORY ORR
All Things Considered, February 20, 2006
We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murder of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villainy as the real one of Henry IV by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not, in fact, feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771
Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Universal History of Infamy
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
THOMAS CARLYLE
On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures
Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
SAUL BELLOW
Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
"Ostig in Sky", A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Essays
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World