"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
— Margaret Fuller

"What refuge is there for the victim who is possessed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to read a hundred?"
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
— Aldous Huxley

""I can't get through the year without getting kicked out or blowing something up."
-Percy Jackson" "
— Rick Riordan (The Demigod Files)

"And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love."
— Sue Monk Kidd

"Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you."
— Orson Scott Card (Treasure Box)

"Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

"My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"I read; I travel; I become"
— Derek Walcott

"Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. "
— Tara Bray Smith

"I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"A Ritual to Read to Each Other


If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider---
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give---yes or no, or maybe---
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."
— William Edgar Stafford

"The Only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read"
— Tom Clancy

"Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Reading to small children is a specialty."
— Clifton Fadiman (Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader)

"In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982"
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

""Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread. "
— François Mauriac

"Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read."
— Christian Bauman

"I write for the same reason I read: because it's all there is for me."
— Christian Bauman

"Life's adventures make great reading!"
— Denise Robbins

"Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them."
— Tara Bray Smith

"No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child"
— Robert D. Harris

"Read "The Story of O." Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

""You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark." "
— Giovanni Boccaccio

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again"
— C.S. Lewis

"You can't read it without reading it."
— Elizabeth

"Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
— Finley Peter Dunne

"Read and live a thousand lives."
— Anonymole

"He talks about God, and loving God. he says that when we open to loving a person, whether that person is a spouse, friend, or child, we open our hearts to loving God. He says when we let someone love us, we're opening our hearts to god's love. he says the acts are the same. p 19
I decide loving isn't for the fain. Its for the courageous. p 19"
— Melody Beattie (The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take)

"Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them."
— Mildred Armstrong Kalish (Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression)

"Irish Charm by Beverly S. Adam- "This a lovely quick read for a flight or a day at the beach." -"
— Cybil Solyn (Review by Rakehell.com)

"When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way incase I die, before I finish, I know how it ends. That my friend is a dark side."
— Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally)

"Sid Hite makes the greatest books"
— Sid Hite (The Distance of Hope)

"If you're great, you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But, if you're only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost. (Read by Henry Miller)"
— Henry Miller

""Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
"
— George Bernard Shaw

"It's not good for me to run away from honest opinions. I can't let that block my writing. Otherwise, I'll never learn how to write more interesting stories. I enjoy writing books, but it isn't easy. But that's why I want to do the best I can. One day, I want to make everyone say, 'What a good book.' (spoken by Hisami Hishishii)"
— Hideyuki Kurata (R.O.D: Read or Dream, Volume 4)