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A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.David Mitchell
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If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.Italo Calvino
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We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.B.F. Skinner
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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
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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.Logan Pearsall Smith
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To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.W. Somerset Maugham
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Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.Criss Jami
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Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.Helen Exley
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My life is a reading list.John Irving
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Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.Jaachynma N.E. Agu
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What kind of life can you have in a house without books?Sherman Alexie
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You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.Azar Nafisi
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Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.Ruth Rendell
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Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.Jaachynma N.E. Agu
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An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...Michel Houellebecq
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Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.Ray Bradbury
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.Anna Quindlen
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That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.Nicole Krauss
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A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.Henry David Thoreau
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You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.C.s. Lewis
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I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.Robert Louis Stevenson
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Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.Louis LAmour
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Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.Joseph Campbell
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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
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Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.Eudora Welty
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I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways.. It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being. .John Connolly
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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
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Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.Neil Gaiman
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Quiet people have the loudest minds.Stephen King
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Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.Jackson Pearce
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A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.Richard P. Denney
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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.Groucho Marx
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Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.Unknown
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From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.Groucho Marx
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I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style, park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part- Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.Karen Marie Moning
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Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them .Italo Calvino
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There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read–unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.E. Nesbit
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Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.Mary Ann Shaffer
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They're book addicts.Lemony Snicket
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A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.Lisa Kleypas
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My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.A.J. Jacobs
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Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.Lena Dunham
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There's a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.Lauren Morrill
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It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.Brandon Sanderson
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Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.Oscar Wilde
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You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.Steven Wright
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I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.Nick Hornby
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The problem with a life spent reading is you know too much.Josh Lanyon
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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 Jr.
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Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost. .Arthur Schopenhauer
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You can't just skip the boring parts."" Of course I can skip the boring parts."" How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"" I can tell."" Then you can't say you've read the whole play."" I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.Gary D. Schmidt
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The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.Lin Yutang
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Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.Ray Bradbury
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The Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.Jasper Fforde
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When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.Jen Knox
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I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak in one day at the right time. When the readers on a new path to find. So for now I'll continue to drop ink and not worry about what other people think.Stanley Victor Paskavich
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There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.Charles Kingsley
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If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.Thomas Carlyle
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History will always repeat itself, because it makes for good reading. It doesn't have to be truthful or factual, just entertaining with the odd fact thrown in for good measure.Anthony T. Hincks
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Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.Unknown
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The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction–until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered–they connect with an audience–or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books–and thus what they count as literature–really tells you more about them than it does about the book.Brent Weeks
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You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.John Waters
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The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role. One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person–which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.Pierre Bayard
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A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.Andre Dubus
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I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.Alberto Caeiro
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We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it.. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.C.s. Lewis
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Books do pretend. ..but squeezed in between is even more that is true–without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?Matthew Pearl
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Truths are dangerous, " he said." Then why are you writing them in a book?"" To catch them between the pages, " said Teddy, "and trap them before they disappear.Kristin Cashore
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You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.Amaka Imani Nkosazana
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No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas! " in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing. .Elizabeth Knox
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The primary purpose of reading the Bible is not to know the Bible but to know God.James Merritt
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When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro – he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful – yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.Unknown
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Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not."" I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken." This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.Elizabeth Knox
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Think before you speak. Read before you think.Fran Lebowitz
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Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.John Witherspoon
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He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.Samuel Johnson
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Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.Amit Kalantri
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Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first..but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.Tahir Shah
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Keep reading! Keep travelling! Keep thinking! And finally you will be there, in the Land of Wisdom where the mind has the power of an eagle’s eye!Mehmet Murat Ildan
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The real education never ends.Lailah Gifty Akita
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Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.Carl R White
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Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.Anthea Syrokou
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Let All Your Life’s Experiences Lead To More Writing & Encourage More Reading..!Sujit Lalwani
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I love words. Â I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. Â I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. Â I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. Â In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.Richelle E. Goodrich
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I shall never exchange reading for riches.Lailah Gifty Akita
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Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.Jacqueline Kelly
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With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.Haruki Murakami
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At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.Benjamin J. Carey
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There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.Alan Clark
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In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death.A. Edward Newton
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In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.Lev Grossman
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What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.Gabrielle Dubois
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Happy be the reader plunged into her book who forgot the world and whom world forgot.Gabrielle Dubois
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If people read poetry, they would be happier.Lailah Gifty Akita
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If we read the Scriptures, God will shine in our heart.Lailah Gifty Akita
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What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again..Italo Calvino
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To quote French author Francois Mauriac, 'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who your are' is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.Sarah Wendell
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Don't be jealous, be agressive. Make 2012 yours!Rachel Firasek
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Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.Unknown