Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Reading a play, you view yourself as part of a whole. You see where the whole thing is going, and so you’re willing to go to the very ugly place that your heart may go...

If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice...

Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like…Professor Hawking’s Brief History of...

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

If you don’t want to waste your time on thinking, start reading.

I like to discover something new each day, to interpret the world in a way others might not, like a child might approach new experiences.

Paul cries, ‘Bring the books’ — join in the cry. Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you.

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched...

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

I think it will last,” said Grandfather. “In my experience when people once begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes....

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis...

I’ve got an image of me at the bottom of my garden sitting under my silver birch tree reading, while everyone else had gone somewhere exotic.

I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not...

Love does not choose belief, place, time, situations, or race. love happens between two souls.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell...

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as...

I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book.

Worship is the marriage of two Spirits – the Spirit of God and the Spirit of man.

Courage is the ability to execute tasks and assignments without fear or intimidation.

If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.’...

Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: we’d read.

Sometimes I’ll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I’ll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels...

The best thing about being a writer is that ‘work’ is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems. It is an escape from the narrow boundaries...

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others,...

The most the average person probably reads in a day is a STOP sign or two. And based on how people drive in Jacksonville, I don’t think they even read that much.

I know a lot about forming personal connections with people. Not from, you know, personal interaction or anything, but from reading about it alone, in silence.

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church–was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to...

For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me… I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside.

But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form,...

Books inspire me to create a better reality.

…And if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.

We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning...

Did you ever hear anyone say, ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me’?

One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures....

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be...

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility.

People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined object in life, and strove through a few hundred engrossing pages to attain...

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I’d already written. And I didn’t want to be an actor.

People don’t read any more. It’s a sad state of affairs. Reading’s the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it’s someone else’s vision, isn’t it?”[Interview in The Independent,...

Sister Ignatius taught me in Sunday School that “in the beginning there was light,” but to me, it was always an incomplete sentence, which God should have known to ammend: in the beginning God created...

The Bible is the most inspired book of all times.

Books are best preserved in the minds of readers.

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think...

true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy,...

In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else’s imagination. My life was suspended – I was in neither one place nor...