Top 100 My Reading Life Quotes
#1. My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.
Eleanor Catton
#3. But if I spend [all] my time *reading* about adventures, I won't actually be *having* them.
Lisa Kleypas
#4. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.
Deborah Lawrenson
#5. I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.
Paul Watson
#6. Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.
Norman Lock
#7. Seems to me there's not much time to read about other people's lives and live your own while you're at it. If I have to choose, and I reckon I do, I'll choose living my own life over reading summat about someone else's.
Sophie Hannah
#8. I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.
Joyce Carol Oates
#9. I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read
Elizabeth Knox
#10. What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.
Harry Mathews
#11. When I put my faith in Jesus Christ as my savior, and I asked him to forgive and to come into my life, and He does - from that moment forward I have established a personal relationship with God that I have to develop, you know, through Bible reading and prayer, and living my life for him.
Anne Graham Lotz
#12. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
Michelle M. Pillow
#13. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?
Elizabeth Gilbert
#14. I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.
Stephenie Meyer
#15. I shudder to think of an eternity spend without books. I have hopes that every book that was ever lost is somewhere waiting for me when my life here finally ends.
Mel Odom
#16. Only for today, I will devote ten minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul
Pope John XXII
#17. I write to get ideas out of my head
Bobbi Kay
#18. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Pat Conroy
#19. I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#20. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#21. I tried to beat my reading addiction..........
Worst two minutes of my life!
Unknown
#22. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#23. In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.
Kate Kerrigan
#24. It changed my life," the first-grader said of the iPad. "I'm reading everything on the street." To prove his point, he read all the words on a pizza box he cradled on his lap.
Anonymous
#25. My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
Pat Conroy
#26. At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.
Jamaica Kincaid
#27. During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.
Halle Berry
#28. Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.
Sue Monk Kidd
#29. I feed my mind by reading everyday as I feed myself by eating every day.
Debasish Mridha
#30. I'm alive. This might be the first time I've ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.
Gregory Sherl
#31. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#32. Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.
Meia Geddes
#33. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#34. I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Alan Furst
#35. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#36. All I really want to do is spend my life traveling the world, reading books that take my breath away, drinking all kinds of tea and occasionally write something. I mean is that too much to ask for?
Anonymous
#37. My goal is to encourage our little ones to make reading a habit. To enjoy picking up a book. So that the habit continues throughout life.
Andrea L'Artiste
#38. I like reading and all that, but a crave to get back tot he life of my infancy and all its freedom. (Sue Bridehead)
Thomas Hardy
#39. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#40. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#41. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.
Sam Hamill
#42. He [Jesus] was the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I've ever encountered in my life or in my reading. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world ...
Charles Templeton
#43. Reading has not only changed my life but saved it. the right picked at the right time - especially the one that scares us, threatens to undermine all we have been told, the one that contains forbidden thoughts - these are the books that become Eve's apples.
Terry Tempest Williams
#44. My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
Barbara Corcoran
#45. I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know.
Jeff Zentner
#46. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
Sergio Leone
#47. I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
Nick Earls
#48. I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.
Guy Johnson
#49. He probably would have looked at me sideways and asked why I was trying to learn how to change my life by reading a book.
Hannah Brencher
#50. Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.
Katherine Paterson
#51. I love buying and collecting good books: I am passionate reader. This is my sacred life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#52. Reading has always been the great love of my life.
Darren Shan
#53. 'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.
Mark Leyner
#54. Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.
Jack Dorsey
#55. I loved reading the Dalai Lama's words: "My religion is loving-kindness." I realized that meant loving-kindness to everyone in my life: past, present, and future; and that meant loving-kindness to myself
in my pain, in my jealousy, in my fear.
Elizabeth Kim
#56. It's not my fault you have the attention span of a gnat, capable of only thumbing through the crap on Facebook, instead of reading something of worth that can change your life. No, I'm not talking about Oprah's or Ellen's book either.
Dara Reidyr
#57. Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Charles De Gaulle
#58. I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life.
S.A. Tawks
#59. I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.
Frank Conroy
#60. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
Paul Auster
#61. Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
Orhan Pamuk
#62. As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
Francis Collins
#64. If I'm writing about my life, I'm already thinking of anyone in my life who might be reading it, and I'm keeping that as a kind of censorship voice in my head. And then, commenters - I'm keeping that in my head, too.
Mandy Stadtmiller
#66. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#67. Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.
Wallace Stegner
#68. Reading has always been a major part of my life. It has broadened my world and taken me to places I would otherwise have never seen. Now that I am a hundred years old (this September) it still takes me to the outside world I can no longer visit.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#69. Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.
Mona Simpson
#70. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
#72. I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.
Amy Bloom
#73. One way of reading my life is that I have been in constant search for a father.
Christine Keeler
#74. I developed my own production company. I'm reading different books and writing, working on myself. I'm being focused on that, but also being focused on in front of the camera and balancing mommy life at the same time. I just want to continue to move forward.
Kyla Pratt
#75. Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?
I know it can.
(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)
Dorothy Allison
#76. I remember reading the script for 'Dangerous Liaisons' and thinking that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life watching this film; the story and the writing were so wonderful.
Stephen Frears
#77. Stories have inspired me all my life. I like reading about what other people have done and it inspires me to share my own stories, and encourage people to make their own life stories.
Phil Keoghan
#78. It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.
Gore Vidal
#79. His life is like your life and my life and all the lives of all the people who are reading these words right now. It's a roiling stew of fear and need and desire and love and the hunger to be loved. And mostly, it's the latter.
Cheryl Strayed
#80. I love being home, reading the paper in the morning and having a cup of coffee, doing laundry, going grocery shopping and running daily errands. For me, it's important to have that balance in my life.
Tristan Prettyman
#81. For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.
Diane Setterfield
#82. If you're reading this, I'm either a wolf for good, or you're Ulrik and you should get the hell out of my stuff.
Maggie Stiefvater
#83. I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I've been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate culture and all that, I think that influenced me a lot.
G-Eazy
#84. Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them
Malebo Sephodi
#85. I shed my borrowed life for an hour and put on the borrowed life of the book I'm reading.
David Levithan
#86. That's why I read so much. A book isn't going to hurt me. A book isn't going to form some opinion about me that could wreck my life. I learn about so many new and great things from reading. I keep to myself with a good book and a shot of whiskey and I'm right with the world.
Paulette Mahurin
#87. You are reading me; over the boundary of time and distance, I am touching you, not with my hands but with my love.
Debasish Mridha
#88. I come from a family of Cherokee master storytellers. Listening to stories, reading them, and creating new tales is my life. These tales reveal the beauty and mystery of people's culture and beliefs.
Louise Ann Barton
#89. I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.
Malorie Blackman
#90. I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real
the lives I had read about in books.
Dorothy Allison
#91. The time spent rereading one book is one less new story I'll be exposed to in my life.
Michelle Madow
#92. SHE Is A Wonderful Romantic Poem With Billions of Lines. Even If I Could, I Wouldn't Finish Reading HER In My Entire Life ...
Muhammad Imran Hasan
#93. I started reading the works of Swami Vivekananda. That gave me courage and a vision, it sharpened and deepened my sensitivities and gave me a new perspective and a direction in life. I decided to dedicate myself to others and till date I am continuing to follow that decision.
Narendra Modi
#94. It has always been a great comfort to me that I could bring a book anywhere, to any place. To any part of my life.
Anton DiSclafani
#95. Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person's home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.
Derek Thompson
#96. This is what reading is like to me. It's finding a spring in the midst of a barren land. Just when I think I might up and die of thirst, I stumble onto this fresh, cold water, and I'm suddenly given this new life because I can-and do-drink to my heart's content.
Beverly Lewis
#97. I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.
Anna Quindlen
#100. I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I'll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants.
Michel Houellebecq
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