READING QUOTES IV
quotations about reading
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Miracle of Language
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
In reality, people read because they want to write. Anyway, reading is a sort of rewriting.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
interview, Les Ecrivains en Personne, 1959
Accurate reading on a wide range of subjects makes the scholar; careful selection of the better makes the saint.
JOHN OF SALISBURY
The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury
I read my eyes out and can't read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Abigail Adams, December 28, 1794
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
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
In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Citizen of the World
Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.
BEN CARSON
Think Big
Love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life which come to every one, for hours of delight.
MONTESQUIEU
attributed, Day's Collacon
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls.
THOMAS CARLYLE
On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
PAUL AUSTER
The Brooklyn Follies
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
W. FUSSELLMAN
"Slogans for a Library", The Library, April 1926
I will read anything rather than work.
JEAN KERR
introduction, Please Don't Eat the Daisies
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
But reading is not idleness ... it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.
STEPHEN SPENDER
journal entry, January 4, 1980