#reading

"Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems."

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

"My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads."

"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

"All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us."

"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it."

"Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!"

"Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books."

"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book."

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

"For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it."

"When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life."

"You learn almost as much about a thinker from what he reads—in particular, what he likes and what he disdains—as from what he writes himself."

"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."

"No two persons ever read the same book."

"Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time."

"They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?"

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book."