In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
I am personally not a lover of audiobooks in general, and I am indeed one of those people who don’t count listening to a book being read by someone else as actually having read that book. It simply is not reading.
I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I’m not a complete idiot at this time.
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.
Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
I never stopped reading.
I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
Not wanting anyone to pop my bubble by speaking to me, I immediately began reading Lesbian Nuns, and that did the trick. No one attempted small talk.
Being Jewish, you didn’t get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn’t want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.