READING QUOTES IV
quotations about reading
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
Some people read too much: the bibliobuli ... who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through the most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H. L. MENCKEN
"Minority Report", Notebooks
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
W. FUSSELLMAN
"Slogans for a Library", The Library, April 1926
Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.
BEN CARSON
Think Big
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
To read merely for reading's sake is almost as unprofitable as not reading at all. Setting out, in the first place with a clear idea of what we wish to learn, which is eminently important, we must afterwards, if we would realize what we have read, reperuse it in thought. This only makes it truly our own.
LEO HARTLEY GRINDON
Life: Its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
attributed, The Miracle of Language
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
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
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
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
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
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
ANONYMOUS
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Miracle of Language
If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
DAVID MAMET
True and False
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
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
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid