Julia could form no opinion of Robert, the bespectacled middle child, for he passed the entire journey with his nose stuck in a book, returning only monosyllabic answers to any questions put to him

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers....

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Most of the time, we don’t know others; we only know our own ideas about others

M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: “He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people’s books, and all that...

Watch out for your ambitions: they may play on your values

Good books are about everything.

Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class.

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was,...

The difference between Marilyn’s and Jayne’s approach to intellectual pursuits is that Marilyn carried big heavy books around and hung out with brainy people to absorb their intellect, while Jayne really had a thirst for...

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.

My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not...

At least books could never let you down.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That’s not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It’s just that I find it quite...

when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live...

It had always fascinated him that she’d consumed so many words, that her head was full of stories, told a thousand different ways.

Guess I’ve been reading too much fantasy.

Every reading is a misreading.

In some literature, I’ve read, weather is used as a metaphor. The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away...

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

Books require titles; reading them doesn’t

I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance...

Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.

The most comfortable place for a tired mind is in the lap of a book.

Holiness may be found by being in the mere presence of books, without evening parting the pages.

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and elevated opinions.

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the...

There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.

Public swimming pools, recreation centers, summer reading programs, youth jobs programs – they are all shutting their doors. And they are all facilities and programs relied on most heavily by low-income children.

There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My...

I am not my sister. Words from the books curl around each othermake little senseuntilI read them againand again, the storysettling into memory. Too slow my teacher says.Read Faster. Too babyish, the teacher says.Read older.But...

For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern...

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.

I think reading is important in any form. I think a person who’s trying to learn to like reading should start off reading about a topic they are interested in, or a person they are...

Only the living can read. This means that when I write, my target market is people of the future. Greetings, people of the moon!

Don’t say negative things about your spouse and children.

A responsible woman sees and accepts only the best in a given situation.

Reading brings us unknown friends

What’s said in silence is best viewed in darkness. I learned that while reading a bowl of Alphabet Soup.

El problema es que el niño es una esponja que registra y absorbe indiscriminadamente todo lo que ve […] El niño formado en la imagen se reduce a ser un hombre que no lee, y,...

Perhaps she was more like him than he’d thought: her home, too, had consisted of paper and printer’s ink. She probably felt as lost as he did in the real world.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.