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Reading Quotes
"I don't think anyone really is interested in reading about my emotional state. It's not even interesting to me."
8
"The industry is becoming very ready for animal identification."
7
"The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write."
7
"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."
7
"The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them."
7
"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems."
7
"I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together."
7
"I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned."
7
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government."
7
"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
7
"God, how I still love private readers. It's what we all used to be."
7
"I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive."
7
"Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers."
7
"I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading."
7
"The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books-but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of-then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas."
7
"Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct."
7
"I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I'm going to write it in German to see if anyone notices."
6
"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."
6
"What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them-to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else."
6
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
6
"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own."
6
"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."
6
"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
6
"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution."
6
"No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about. But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down."
6
"To campaign against colonialism is like barking up a tree that has already been cut down."
6
"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."
6
"So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time."
6
"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
5
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"
5
"Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved."
5
"The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole."
5
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."
5
"I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day."
5
"It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book."
5
"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."
5
"Of course. You get everything from books."
5
"Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes."
4
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