"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Reading, Writing

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"From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library..."

Alice Hoffman, American Author

Reading, Solace, Life, Knowledge

"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Joy, Books, Passion

"Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process."

Marilyn vos Savant, American Writer

Reading, Read

"Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way."

Jim Rohn, American Businessman

Reading, Books, Choice, Values

"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads."

Sherman Alexie, American Writer

Reading, Knowledge, Survival, Learning

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Reading, Books, Time, Knowledge

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

Lewis Carroll, English Author

Reading, Books, Conversation, Imagination, Engagement

"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."

Tahir Shah, British Author

Reading, Observation, Isolation, Curiosity

"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Learning, Passion, Knowledge

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish Philosopher

Reading, Time, Values, Wisdom

Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it."

Needs

"Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible."

Philosophy

"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers."

Art

"He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little."

Maturity

"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken foot."

Innocence

"The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb."

Grief

"To do nothing is the way to be nothing."

Philosophy

"The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors."

Fear

"He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime."

Hope

"An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!"

Philosophy