Reading Quotes

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

George Robert Gissing

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.

Jodi Picoult

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Oscar Wilde

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Oscar Wilde

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

John Aubrey

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Rufus Choate

A book is the only immortality.

Rufus Choate

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Charles Kingsley

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things -- the teacher of all truth.

Charles Kingsley

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

Jane Austen

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Cassandra Clare

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

Virginia Woolf

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

James Baldwin

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Giorgos Seferis

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

Charles de Secondat

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.

Oliver Wendell Holmes