Reading Quotes

The notions of a young man of one or two and twenty,' said he, 'as to what is necessary in manners to make him quite the thing, are more absurd, I believe, than those of any other set of beings in the world. The folly of the means they often employ is only to be equalled by the folly of what they have in view.

Jane Austen

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

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

Ernest Hemingway

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

C.S. Lewis

I loathe people who say, 'I always read the ending of the book first.' That really irritates me, It's like someone coming to dinner, just opening the fridge and eating pudding, while you're standing there still working on the starter. It's not on.

J.K. Rowling

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

William Makepeace Thackeray

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Stephane Mallarme

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.

Abraham Lincoln

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

Stephen King

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Oswald Chambers

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Mark Twain

Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you---how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions.

Virginia Woolf

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LI

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

Benjamin Franklin

Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

John Green

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

Abraham Lincoln

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Terry Pratchett

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

Henry David Thoreau

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

Samuel Johnson