#reading

"If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment."

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."

"As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!"

"Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand."

"Let All Your Life’s Experiences Lead To More Writing & Encourage More Reading..!"

"Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"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, or who had ever been alive."

"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."

"Reading is reading - no matter what the material."

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."

"There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't."

"Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."

"I even love the smell of books."

"Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories."

"From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."

"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."

"Every night I pray I whisper into a megaphone, not only so God is sure to hear, but also my neighbors, because I pray to God He’ll deliver pestilence and plague to the residents next door. I even tell God the exact address, as if He can’t read my heart. But it’s not for His benefit, it’s for my neighbors’."

"Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good."