#reading

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."

"I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer."

"I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on."

"I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey."

"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."

"Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter."

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

"When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth."

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

"The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated."

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

"I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess."

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep"

"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!"

"My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art."

"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."

"This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read."

"For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me... I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside."