645 quotes found
“She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.”
“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.”
“I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.”
“Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t mak...”
“And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.”
“...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.”
“She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.”
“I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.”
“The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.”
“She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.”
“...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled l...”
“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those...”
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
“Reading is more important than writing.”
“There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. (1952)”
“I love reading I know it’s very important and I respect anyone that is patient enough to do it.”
“God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.”
“I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even b...”
“Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, wri...”
“Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, ...”
