Reading has been the fuel of my motivation, it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
…the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
in a letter to Oskar Pollak
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
Children don’t read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology…. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff…. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don’t expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself… You bring to a novel—anything you read—all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale.
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”
Comic: “Sandman #28” by Neil Gaiman
My girlfriend always laughs during sex–no matter what she’s reading.
There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house.
Time in life is short. You can only read so many books, so choose wisely.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
We forfeit the chief source of dignity and sweetness in life if we do not seek converse with the greater minds that have left their vestiges on the world.
You read about love in books and you think you know what it’s all about, and then it happens to you and you realize you hadn’t understood anything about it at all up to that point.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.