Reading Quotes

“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.”
― Helen Exley

“Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
― Emilie Buchwald

“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.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”
― Carl Sagan

“It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.”
― Benedict Cumberbatch

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Hikayatin mo lahat ng kakilala mo na magkaroon ng kahit isa man lang paboritong libro sa buhay nila. Dahil wala nang mas kawawa pa sa mga taong literado pero hindi nagbabasa.”
― Bob Ong

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”
― Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

“Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“Tris: "I was reading."
Sandry: "You're always reading. The only way people can ever talk to you is to interrupt."
Tris: "Then maybe they shouldn't talk to me.”
― Tamora Pierce, Briar's Book

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
― Socrates

“As always, one of her books was next to her.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.”
― Philip Pullman

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“The phrase 'see attached bibliography' is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas a Kempis

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”
― Anthony Trollope

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“My arms are killing me.
I didn't know words could be so heavy.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”
― Anne Fadiman