Quotes About Reading

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”- James Baldwin

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”- Oscar Wilde

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."- Toni Morrison

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”

-Voltaire

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”-Jane Smiley

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”- Mortimer J. Adler

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”- Anna Quindlen

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”- Nora Ephron

“The world was hers for the reading.”- Betty Smith

“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.”- Alan Bennett

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”- Fernando Pessoa

“Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.” – Alberto Manguel

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”- Saul Bellow

“A good book is an event in my life.”- Stendhal

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.” -Francois Mauriac

“Reading brings us unknown friends”- Honore de Balzac

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.”―Gloria Steinem

“My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” - Malcolm X

“What a blessing it is to love books.” – Elizabeth von Arnim

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”- Ursula K. LeGuin

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.” – Jeanette Winterson

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."- Franz Kafka

“We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.” – John Lubbock

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard

“I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.” – Benedict Cumberbatch

“The world belongs to those who read.” – Rick Holland

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.” – Charles Baudelaire