Theres nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief.
Reading the situation correctly is part of getting through it safely.
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.
Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews’s Sermons?
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.
I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has bcome the secret friend of their author.
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.