Time Reading A Book Quotes & Sayings

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along. — Anne Fadiman

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time. — Bill Watterson

All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television. — Kathryn Magendie

The PATRIOT Act allows Federal agents to look at public and university library patron circulation records, books checked out, magazines consulted, all subject to government scrutiny. There used to be a time in this country when we were worried whether our young people knew how to read. Now some in our government are more worried that government agents be able to find out what people are reading. — Dennis Kucinich

This is much more than your typical thriller. Tim Johnston has written a book that makes Gone Girl seem gimmicky ... Johnston is an excellent writer. You want to set this one down so you can take a breath, and keep reading
all at the same time. — Alan Cheuse

The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second. — Karen Joy Fowler

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. — C.S. Lewis

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived. — Betty Smith

It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a s mall group of specialists, just as shoe-making or farming is for us. Think how much time would be saved. We send children to school and they spend most of their time learning to read and then, when they leave, they never pick up another book for the rest of their lives. Reading is only important if there is something worthwhile to read. Most of it is ephemeral. That means an oral culture of tales told and remembered. People can be immensely sophisticated in thought and understanding without much writing. — Iain Pears

Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without a doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you're into the 30-second digital mode. — Ken Pugh

In that house, Rob read. Rather, Jackie read to him, but she felt as if he were reading along with her. With the opening of a book, a shift occurred in his eyes and he nestled an inch deeper into her lap while angling his chin upward, and he seemed to age a year or two. Not a reader herself, Jackie went to the local library for the first time and pulled the popular titles: the Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry wordbooks, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle. — Jeff Hobbs

You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself. — Jennifer Donnelly

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.
Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.
But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. — Richard Flanagan

French with Madame Fine is reduce to a long series of technical exercises whether we're doing grammar or reading texts. With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: Did you like this book? — Muriel Barbery

Then I got undressed and, crawling under the covers, sat up in bed and sipped my drink. I felt like I was going to fade out any second, but I had to allow myself this luxury. A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep. Having a drink in bed while listening to music and reading a book. As precious to me as a beautiful sunset or good clean air. — Haruki Murakami

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap. — Kelly Corrigan

I stared at them. 'Every time what?' I said, as Nathan put the money into Will's hand.
'He said you'd be reading a book. I said you'd be watching telly. He always wins.'
My sandwich stilled at my lips. 'Always?
You've been betting on how boring my life is? — Jojo Moyes

A book is a map ... There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book ... The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times. — Matt Haig

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

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. — Laura Florand

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

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone. — Jennifer Weiner

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it. — Elias Canetti

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read - with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature. — Andrew Clements

Chicken Soup for the Soul". You've heard of these books, am I right? We've all heard of them. But I wonder if you're aware of just how many "Chicken Soup" books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another "Chicken Soup" book is being born. — Marisa De Los Santos

{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed - all I have ever needed - was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice. — Michael Chabon

When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today. Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can't read a page a minute, the rate at which you're probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you've read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated. — Joshua Foer

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career. — Al Yankovic

Books were seen as a waste of time. What was the point, unless you were reading for information? To lose oneself in a book was to be slightly wacky, a little greedy and ultimately slothful. There was no value. You couldn't make money from reading a book. A book did not clean bathrooms and waxed floors. It did not put the garden in. You couldn't have a conversation while reading. It was arrogant and alienated others. In short, those who read were wasteful and haughty and incapable of living in the real world. They were dreamers. — David Bergen

Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame. He lay down in his haphazard cot. After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing - the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. He would live in hell, because love is that also. — Richard Flanagan

It's not in my nature to chop people's heads off, per se, or rob a bank or any crazy thing I've done on screen. I'm just comfortable reading a book or spending time with my wife and my daughter or watching the fight on TV with the fellas. — Bokeem Woodbine

One trouble with developing speed reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you've already finished it. — Franklin P. Jones

Telling me I'm pretty is nice and all, but if you really want to make my day, tell me I inspired you to read a book. Say you picked up a novel I've raved about and that you fell in love with it, too. Or tell me the time we spent reading aloud together was one of your favorite moments. Ask me to read to you, and beg for another chapter. This will fill me with indescribable joy and purpose.
And if you really want to make me speechless with wonder, tell me it was MY words and MY story you enjoyed. Tell me you shed tears over the things my characters went through, and that you're just a little bit in love with them, too. I might never recover. I will carry those words around in my heart for the rest of my life, like a talisman against all past and future criticisms.
That's how important stories are to me. — J.M. Richards

If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp. — Deb Caletti

In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.
First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark. — Mark Z. Danielewski

The juggler seemed worried. "Throw it a book," he said.

I threw it a book, and it tore into it, like a cat ripping a small animal apart; and while the creature ate its book the juggler pushed the door open. He nearly fell into a deep chasm on the other side. "Not a disaster," he said, as if he was trying to convince himself. "We need more books. Big books."

It didn't seem like a good time for reading, but I pulled two huge old books off the shelf in the corner and carried them over to him. He took one, but didn't read it. He told it what a bad book it was and threw it on the ground. The book bounced in the air and hung there quivering, and the juggler man jumped onto it and began to float away. "As long as they think you don't like them," said the juggler, "they migrate back to the library. And we get a free ride."

I rode next to him on my book, and we crossed the chasm safely. The books floated away and I waved them good-bye. — Neil Gaiman

Every time I have a bad day, I'll just find a corner, bring out my book and then everything starts to feel better. — Wency June Z. Libot

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

A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition. — Michael Silverblatt

I view askance a book that remains undisturbed for a year. Oughtn't it to have a ticket of leave? I think I may safely say no bookin my library remains unopened a year at a time, except my own works and Tennyson's. — Carolyn Wells

I was really unfit last year, so I worked out for a long time, then spent time by myself in Oregon. For about two months the only person I saw was my trainer. Every day I did a lot of running and I just didn't want to talk to anyone for two months. So when I started talking again, it was like you would communicate wrongly, like you wouldn't really remember how to speak. That was one of the key things as well as just reading the book, reading the script a million times, just figuring things out. — Robert Pattinson

Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure. — Atwood H. Townsend

I spend so much time on the Internet ... I feel like I'm a million pages into the worst book ever, and I'm never going to stop reading. — Aziz Ansari

What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away
almost as if the story is altered depending on who's reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that
a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who's doing the changing: the story, or the reader. — Jodi Picoult

Read a poem at a time, or two, or all, but give them time to sink into your heart. Read them again, read a portion, and stop and ponder. Visualize. Take it slow; let the poem show you what lies in your own heart. Let it fuel the words from within. — Salil Jha

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one. — James Goldsmith

Every time Wallander stepped into a strange apartment, he felt as though he were looking at the covers of a book he had just bought. The apartment, the furniture, the pictures on the walls, and the smells were the title. Now he had to start reading. — Henning Mankell

Was it possible to love more than one person at the same time? I had always thought it just kind of a convenient notion that authors of novels and screen plays used to amp up intrigue in their stories. I could remember more than a few times while reading a book or watching a movie, I had laughed and rolled my eyes at the heroine for finding herself in such a situation. And yet . . . here I was . . . — D.T. Dyllin

If I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know. — Michael Haneke

Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like ... Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of ... of whatever it is that the book is about? — Alexander McCall Smith

The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It's as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten. — Mitch Albom

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me
and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting
into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school.
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "o" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start. — Eudora Welty

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. — Samuel Johnson

It sometimes happens that a man who, up until now has believed himself to be gifted with perfect health, opens a medical book, either by chance or to pass the time, and on reading the pathological description of an illness, recognises that he is afflicted by it; enlightened by a fateful flash of insight, he feels at every symptom mentioned some obscure organ shuddering within him, or some hidden fibre of whose role in the body he had been unaware, and he pales as he realises that a death he thought was still a long way off is so imminent. — Theophile Gautier

I think it's because when you hold a book you're also holding a tree in one form or another, and that direct connection lets me know how important books are in the world. Pages are called leaves, a spine of a book comes from the spine of the animal whose skin was used in the first books as covers; everything about books refers us back to the physical world. Not that ebook readers aren't useful for those of us whose eyes are getting worse with age. But the reading of a book - a physical book - lets us know how time is passing, and how we are passing time, in something more than percentage numbers. — Ali Smith

One habit: choosing a book and starting each day with a dedicated time of reading and gazing, becoming an apprentice to a mind I admire. — Frances Mayes

Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality. — Cecelia Ahern

It's like you're reading a book and every time someone's tearing the pages. — Sara Shepard

It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book. — Nella Last

There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyages, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel. — Lemony Snicket

it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters — Alain Mabanckou

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading. — Chuck Palahniuk

Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my "plan" was for taking down the Christmas tree. — Tina Fey

Other people think destiny is a time in one's life, such as the moment one becomes an adult, or the instant it becomes necessary to construct a hiding place out of sofa cushions. And still other people think that destiny is an invisible force, like gravity, or a fear of paper cuts, that guide everyone throughout their lives, whether they are embarking on a mysterious errand, doing a treacherous deed, or deciding that a book they have begun reading is too dreadful to finish, — Lemony Snicket

My role is to promote the authors image and their new books. I'm also brought on board when the author is "between books" to keep the name in front of the reading public. That's a challenging time for an author. — Tom Robinson

For many Christ-followers, the Bible is a book of principles to show us how to live. No wonder we struggle to spend time in the Word - how excited are you about spending time reading a to-do list that's 1,500 pages long? When we view the Bible primarily as a book of principles for living, we miss the point. The point of the Bible is not principles but a Person. Jesus said in John 5:39, "These are the Scriptures that testify about me." He is the point. If our interaction with the Word isn't resulting in a deepening intimacy with Jesus, a deepening experience of His love and grace, we are missing something huge. — Alan Kraft

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time. — Antony Beevor

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book
if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading. — Philip Roth

Being gay, the last time I looked, had nothing to do with reading a balance book, fixing a broken bone or changing a spark plug. — William J. Clinton

I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn't get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren't irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn't the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people. — Elif Batuman

Words are alive
when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over.
Reading isn't passive
I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations,
scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them.
Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many. — Gary Paulsen

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book. — Nora Ephron

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time - not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism. — Colin Firth

If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process. — George Saunders

Whatever truth you have chosen, read only a small portion of it, endeavouring to taste and digest it, to extract the essence and substance thereof, and proceed no farther while any savour or relish remains in the passage: when this subsides, pick up your book again and proceed as before, seldom reading more than half a page at a time, for it is not the quantity that is read, but the manner of reading, that yields us profit. — Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

I don't give any book a big chance. If it isn't interesting from the get-go, I let go. Sure I paid for the book, but I don't have to pay more in my time to read a book that bores me. If I don't enjoy reading it, why read it? For my original investment in the book? That's silly. — Jon Spoelstra

So this is supposed to be the how, and when, and why, and what or reading - about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. "We talked about books," says a character in Charles Baxter's wonderful Feast of Love, "how boring they were to read, but how you loved them anyway. Anyone who hasn't felt like that isn't owning up. — Nick Hornby

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. — Moses Hadas

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing — Cynthia Kadohata

I'm a quiet person's nightmare - the only time I shut up is when I'm reading, because I'm a book geek. — Jodie Whittaker

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on ... By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch. — James A. Baldwin

The first time I heard him speak, I was sunk; his voice made my stomach do a skydive to my toes without a parachute. His voice reminded me of jazz and the bedroom and a strip tease: melodic, deep, soothing, slightly sandpapery, but with an irreverent, careless quality. I daydreamed about him reading me a book, the newspaper, a greeting card, an eviction notice - anything. — Penny Reid

Sometimes I forget myself in a book. And when i have to stop reading it takes me a minute to remember where I am. Or who I am. — Anonymous

Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like ... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [ ... ] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading. — Tim O'Brien

When I am working on a painting, everything that I am thinking about at the time be it current events, the books I am reading, personal events, influences, emotions, etc. all find their way into my work. — Ali Banisadr

Never give more time to reading a book than to reflecting upon its contents. — Frank Morton McMurry

Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Time softened on Sundays; it stretched itself out in vast rubbery lengths, and by two o'clock, there was more of it than would ever be needed for anything. There was no point in reading a book, writing a letter, or playing a game, because time was too flaccid ever to proceed to the moment in which the plot would twist, the letter would be sent, or the game would be won. — Annie Barrows

Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body. We get some sense of perspective reading such books. Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live. — Dorothy Day

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was. — Scott Turow

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)] — Carl Sagan

There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal - like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al - Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. "But what shall I say to Hal - that I have never loved him?" Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, "Et Al - qu'est-ce que je vais lui dire? — Adam Gopnik

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book. — Margaret Atwood

What made Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein such creative geniuses? It wasn't reading books or watching YouTube talks about How To Be More Creative, that's for sure ... If startling insights could be systematically arrived at, they wouldn't be startling. The best you can do is to create a conducive environment: put in the hours; take time to daydream; avoid mind-corroding substances. — Oliver Burkeman

We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them. — Lloyd Alexander

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do. — Wendy Lesser

I just stopped reading a lot of books. I mean, I read books that I have to read for school, but I don't actually pick up a book and read for fun. On my time off, I go to movies, hang out with friends, go shopping ... just little things. — Mark Indelicato

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book. — Robin Gibb

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature. — Doris Lessing

Brilliant ... Marriage Confidential is both laugh-out-loud funny and gasp-out-loud shocking, and nothing less than a Feminine Mystique for our time. Mark my words, your marriage will change after reading this book. — Debby Applegate