Reading That Reads Quotes & Sayings

He lives hard, works hard, has but few comforts and fewer necessities. He has but little, if any, taste for reading. He enjoys a coarse practical joke or smutty story; loves danger but abhors labor of the common kind; never tires riding, never wants to walk, no matter how short the distance he desires to go. He would rather fight with pistols than pray; loves tobacco, liquor and women better than any other trinity. His life borders nearly upon that of an Indian. If he reads anything, it is in most cases a blood and thunder story of sensational style. He enjoys his pipe, and relishes a practical joke on comrades, or a corrupt tale, wherein abounds much vulgarity and animal propensity. — Joseph Mccoy

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle ... — Vladimir Nabokov

Woe be to him that reads but one book. — George Herbert

Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn't mean you've reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it. — Frank Zappa

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book ... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic. — Martha V. Parravano

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood. — Samuel Johnson

I promote reading. I travel anywhere any time. In my books the indivuals face fears, issues, love, friendships, and are reminded qently that God is near! Great reads by Linda Green, Rosemary barkes,Liz Thompson, Richard Paul Evans — Susan Kay Box Brunner

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events. — Samuel Johnson

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. — Charles Lamb

A lot of people feel as though they are not retaining information because of a lack of intelligence, where the true reason is that they were not properly taught how to read. The more a person re-reads, the more difficult it is to remember the information. They lose confidence in their memory and come to the conclusion that they do not understand what they are reading. — David Kaufield

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves - they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay - to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games? — Mark Edmundson

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. — Italo Calvino

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from. — Ronnie Montrose

My guess? Romance novels. My guess? She started reading them early. My guess? She started them at a time where they made a huge impression on her and changed her perceptions. She isn't cocooned, she pays attention and she knows there are no men out there like the men in those books she reads so she prefers being with them than trying to find someone like them which, she thinks, is a fruitless endeavor. That fantasy is far better than any reality and, you know what? She's right. Men are a pain in the ass and a lot of them are dicks who cause heartbreak. And her, a girl like Faye? Well, she knows she's the kind of girl men like that will chew up and spit out. So she's smart and she's not going to go there. — Kristen Ashley

Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.] — John Dunning

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour - write, write, write. — Madeleine L'Engle

I read books all the time, I'm always reading. I'm not like somebody that reads really fast or a lot or anything, but I always have a book that I'm reading. — Christopher Owens

When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it. — Salman Rushdie

[I]t is not hasty reading
but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee's touching of the flower, which gathers honey
but her abiding for a time upon the flower, which draws out the sweet. It is not he who reads most
but he who meditates most, who will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian. — Thomas Brooks

The family that reads together grows together! — Carmela Dutra

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. — Walter Mosley

Millions of flying saucers landin' all the time and the government keeps hushing it up.' 'Why?' said Wensleydale. Adam hesitated. His reading hadn't provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarian just took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up. 'Cos they're the government,' said Adam simply. 'That's what governments do. They've got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they've hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets into work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that's happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them.' 'I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper,' said Wensleydale, — Terry Pratchett

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.
...
We are quite persuaded that the very best way for you to be spending your leisure time, is to be either reading or praying. You may get much instruction from books which afterwards you may use as a true weapon in your Lord and Master's service. Paul cries, "Bring the books" - join in the cry. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The woodchopper reads the wisdom of the ages recorded on the paper that holds his dinner, then lights his pipe with it. When we ask for a scrap of paper for the most trivial use, it may have the confessions of Augustine or the sonnets of Shakespeare, and we not observe it. The student kindles his fire, the editor packs his trunk, the sportsman loads his gun, the traveler wraps his dinner, the Irishman papers his shanty, the schoolboy peppers the plastering, the belle pins up her hair, with the printed thoughts of men. — Henry David Thoreau

The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television. — Eric Burns

A Pennsylvania woman convicted for shoplifting was sentenced to wear a badge that reads "Convicted Shoplifter." However, her lawyers hope to plea bargain down to a bumper sticker reading "I'd Rather Be Stealing!. — Jimmy Fallon

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be. — Alain De Botton

Everybody reads for me. I was never weird about that. I never minded coming in and reading. They should know if I'm the right person, and I should know if I want to do a movie. — Jodie Foster

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read. — H.L. Mencken

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.' ... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison. — C.S. Lewis

The church becomes a community called atonement every time it reads the story of Jesus and every time it identifies itself with that story and every time it invites others to listen in to hear that story. Reading Scripture and listening to Scripture and letting Scripture incorporate us into its story is atoning. — Scot McKnight

The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it. - Sidelines — Lois McMaster Bujold

Movie or no, you should never put pictures of the book's characters on the cover. That only cramps the reader's fantasy. You force him to keep seeing the faces of the actors in the movie. For someone who has seen the movie first and then, out of curiosity, goes on to read the whole book, that might not be so bad. But anyone who reads the book first is faced with a dilemma. During the reading he sees the faces of all the characters in his mind's eye. Faces he wants to assemble with his own fantasy. No matter how those faces may be described. Despite your superfluous descriptions of noses, eyes, ears, and hair color, each reader constructs his own faces in his own imagination. Three hundred thousand readers; that's three hundred thousand different faces for each character. Three hundred thousand faces that are destroyed at one fell swoop by that one face in the movie. As a reader, it's pretty tough to remember that imaginary face after seeing the actor on the screen. Two — Herman Koch

Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions. — David Simon

I love people that read. I think it screams humility. When someone reads, they are essentially admitting they want more, that the world is not enough for them. They want more knowledge, more experience. Whatever this life is, they want more of it. — Nicholas Browne

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. — Siri Hustvedt

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer - any writer, beginning or otherwise - is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or - kindest of all - goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind. — Shirley Jackson

I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range ... " I don't know what people want, really. — Mary J. Miller

See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else. — Rebecca Wells

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly. — B.J. Ward

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. — Lin Yutang

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time. — Louis L'Amour

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian ... He's bound to lose perspective. — Robert Musil

Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men. This observation insults Amelia because it implies that she only reads books with classically romantic heroes. She does not mind the occasional novel with a romantic hero but her reading taste are far more varied than that. Furthermore, she adores Humbert Humbert as a character while accepting the fact that she wouldn't really want him for a life partner, a boyfriend, or even a casual acquaintance. She feels the same way about Holden Caulfield, and Misters Rochester and Darcy. — Gabrielle Zevin

Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. 'Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M'Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and-'
'Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M'Turk. 'He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says we're "children of noble races, trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck! — Rudyard Kipling

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be ... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else. — D.H. Lawrence

See, some guys prefer asses
Some prefer tits
And I'm not saying that I don't like those bits
But what's more important
What supersedes
Is a girl a with passion, wit and dreams
So I want a girl who reads. — Mark Grist

As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the ... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading. — Marie Clay

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy ... Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes. — Mark Helprin

Beware that the one who reads is the same as the book, the same as what is read, the same as the speaker and the same as what is spoken without being the word. — Mohammed Dib

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads. — Harold Bloom

I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that. — Mildred Aldrich

Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed. — Bell Hooks

Always write exactly what you're feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work ... make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it ... just put your heart and soul into all that you do ... then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel. -Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

The attitude of the actor is his interpretation of what he reads, and the written word is what creates the role in the actor's mind, and I guess in reading the things that were given to me, I reacted as you guys saw me, you know. — Gene Barry

A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well. — Deanna Vasquez

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media. — Martijn Benders

Cam starts laughing, "Oh, I love it when she reads." He turns to Lucy who's face is starting to contort and turn to a bright shade of red, "She reads these smutty books, like full on dirty shit, full of sex and like ... bdsm shit."
"I'm not joking boys, they're like full on pornographic. Talking about silky shafts and veiny dicks and shit," Logan is now on the ground holding his side from the pain of laughing too hard.
"Sometimes she'll be reading, then all of sudden she'll put her book down and look at me like she wants to eat me, literally eat me!" he yells, laughing harder, still swatting away her hands that are trying to shut him up, "I mean I don't mind it, not at all. It's hot as fuck. And she wants to try everything she reads in these books. Like ... everything. She learns everything from these books ... so I don't give a shit when, of how much she reads, I get rewards. — Jay McLean

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it. — Carlton Cuse

At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing — Pamela Paul

Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: 'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them!' This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Next to praying there is nothing so important in practical religion as Bible reading. By reading that book we may learn what to believe, what to be, and what to do; how to live with comfort, and how to die in peace.
Happy is that man who possesses a Bible! Happier still is he who reads it! Happiest of all is he who not only reads it, but obeys it, and makes it the rule of his faith and practice! — J.C. Ryle

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting. — John Green

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word "orthodox," which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning "right opinion." These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an "A" to the damnation of one's soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of "true." If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books. — Mortimer J. Adler

The Bible is a book that every Christian should read, listen to, or have read to him or her throughout his or her lifetime; however, in the event that God has gifted a person with the characteristic for the utter joy that envelopes some during times of, what they would describe as, "pleasure reading" (an often times rare characteristic), it is only acceptable that he or she (particularly) reads His Holy Word at least once during his or her lifetime. At least, that's what I think. — Becky Watson

It seems to me that an often quiet, but often palpable presiding image here ... is the interpretive absorption of the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may or may not (yet?) have resolved ... Such a child - if she reads at all - is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads. — Robert Southey