quotations about reading
There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyage, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.
DANIEL HANDLER
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as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
ITALO CALVINO
The Uses of Literature
By reading a man does, as it were, antidate his life, and makes himself contemporary with past ages.
J. COLLIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Sound and healthy reading will develop and enkindle the soul, enlighten the mind, and vivify and direct the imagination.
LOUISE SWANTON BELLOC
attributed, Day's Collacon
If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
The Autobiography of Methuselah
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
JOHN LOCKE
A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding
The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
ALAN BENNETT
The History Boys
I will read anything rather than work.
JEAN KERR
introduction, Please Don't Eat the Daisies
A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Long Fall
Read to live, not live to read.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Miracle of Language
A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page.
ROBERT ELDRIDGE ARIS WILLMOTT
Pleasures, Objects and Advantages of Literature
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Essays
To read is to enter an intercourse with a text.
VARUN BEGLEY
"The Unbearable Freud"
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. TREVELYAN
English Social History
You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Thinking for Oneself", Parerga und Paralipomena
The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Autobiography