I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Don’t run around looking for someone who can sexually satisfy you, run around and look for the book which will intellectually satisfy you.

Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years of age,...

Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.

So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of...

We are not reading books merely to check off a list or to be able to say we have read them. We are reading to grow as persons, to know more that we may understand...

Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.

She was holding desperately on to the words who had saved her life.” The Book Thief

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.

People share books they love. They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages. In sharing a loved book,...

Readers don’t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face...

Consider a small child sitting on his mother’s lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle...

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring...

Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.

These two oo in “book” are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Le Vrai lecteur écrit le livre en le lisant.

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

You’ll get younger not from what you read but from what you apply in your life. (192)

On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

You read a book for the story, for each of its words,” Gordy said, “and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take...

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

In fact, the Devil is delighted when we spend our time and energy defending the Bible, as long as we do not get around to actually reading the Bible.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Bad eyesight is a very good thing when in love

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him...

Capitulating when losing is an issue in war; capitulating when winning is an issue in love

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer...

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone...

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had...

If you can’t fuck me while I read, fuck off.

Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hätte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt.

Some people buy books not to read but to dream, the moment 2-3 sentences read and lost in imagination. Take a paper and begin writing…..

When I say to a parent, ‘read to a child,’ I don’t want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.

Just read one book a month and at the end of they year you would be totally different but an impressive personality.

We haven’t remained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time. Through books Cathy and I have lived a zillion lives . . . our vicarious way to feel alive.

I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book – at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end – is a rite of passage in a reader’s life, the literary equivalent...

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you’re busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat,...

All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind”, said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. “I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can’t...

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken...

… reading was hardly as practical a skill as being able to handle a dagger or use Allomancy?

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and...

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in...