Top 100 Quotes About Not Reading Books
#1. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#2. They're her book club but I don't know why because they're not reading books.
Emma Donoghue
#3. He was always teasing me about not reading books, but one day he said: Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
Glen Duncan
#4. We are not reading books merely to check off a list or to be able to say we have read them. We are reading to grow as persons, to know more that we may understand more, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, to act according to our greater wisdom.
Karen Glass
#5. And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books."
"Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
#6. It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.
Pam Brown
#7. The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything.
Jo Walton
#8. I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.
James Goodnight
#9. I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
#11. When you're younger and you see something that really speaks to you, it's indelible in a way that's not the same as when you're an adult. So I'll always love reading books and making movies that resonate with young people.
Nina Jacobson
#12. To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#13. 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
#14. Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?
Alan Bennett
#15. There are far more a worst crimes than burning books ... Not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#16. You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
Alan Bradley
#17. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.
William Hazlitt
#18. My books are not generic. You know when you're reading a Joy Fielding book.
Joy Fielding
#20. Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.
Jesse Jackson
#22. [T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement
not incitement.
Susan Sontag
#23. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Anthony Browne
#24. Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
#25. I like things to be really, really funny, or really, really dramatic. Those books are certainly the ones that grab me. I like the exercise of reading through a paragraph, and it's just torture. I try not to have my eyes dart to the right. That's the stuff that I love.
Angie Harmon
#26. Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?
Karl Kraus
#27. 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
#28. To live in books is cowardly
but people are not worth investigation.
Lily Koppel
#29. Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
#30. 1. One learns of life not from reading books, but through living and experiencing.
2. Those who experience most aspects of life are more knowledgeable than those who only read about them.
Emiliya Ahmadova
#31. Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
Lord Chesterfield
#32. There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.
Patrick Rothfuss
#33. Wisdom is not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind, everything else is hearsay.
Joan Erikson
#34. We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#35. There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.
Aleksandar Hemon
#36. Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.
Sei Shonagon
#37. The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. ... they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
Thomas Mann
#38. Reading was artificial borrowed life, benefiting from ideas and sensations transmitted cerebrally, acquiring the treasures of human truth by purchase or swindle, not by work.
Benito Perez Galdos
#39. Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
Lemony Snicket
#40. Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar Nafisi
#41. Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#42. In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
C.S. Lewis
#43. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
Laura Lippman
#44. Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment."
Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?"
"I bet you'll tell me."
" 'If you're reading this, you are one.' "
You're a riot.
Brandon Mull
#45. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.
Jenny Colgan
#47. I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.
Gina Barreca
#48. I also like to escape inside their world,
tucked behind their colorful spines. It forces me to fully invest
my mind into what I'm doing, not just my ears or my eyes.
Katie Kacvinsky
#49. Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#50. When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
Marilynne Robinson
#51. Thank God for books, for validating your feelings, and letting you know you're not alone.
Paula Gruben
#52. Maybe it's not about the journey but rather the way you imagine the journey when you read a book.
BeaOngjoco
#53. If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read.
Tony Reinke
#54. Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.
Thomas Ehrlich
#55. Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
Milan Kundera
#56. A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C.S. Lewis
#57. Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us - to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it is.
Andrew Kaufman
#58. It is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
Gertrude Stein
#59. I tried to get into comics initially after I graduated Clemson in 1994. I spent a year trying to get in, and I quit reading books because not getting in made me sad.
Jonathan Hickman
#60. There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.
Carla H. Krueger
#61. ...I used to think if you read enough books you'd automatically know how to do everything the right way. But reading and doing are not the same at all.
Judy Blume
#62. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#63. It is not enough to read many books, you have to read the right ones.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#64. I often find that once a child unlocks the secret of words, they hunger for them. There is a kind of magic in reading. It takes the mind to places where the body may not go, allowing one to forget, for a while, life's troubles.
Liana LeFey
#65. Isn't reading a kind of preparation for life?'
But life is composed of things other than books. It is as if an athlete, on entering the stadium, were to complain that he's not outside exercising.This was the goal of your exercise, of your weights, your practice ring and your training partners.
Epictetus
#66. Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?
Django Wexler
#67. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children ... do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
Neil Gaiman
#68. This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.
Erri De Luca
#69. But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.
Matt De La Pena
#70. I would not, if I could, give up the memory of the joy I have had in books for any advantage that could be offered in other pursuits or occupations. Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
#71. If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.
John Berry
#72. I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
John Green
#74. The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.
Lewis Buzbee
#75. I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
Alberto Manguel
#76. Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.
LZ Granderson
#77. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#78. A lot of people assume you can think better with a slow diet of books, but that will not be the case for every reader. I prefer inundation.
Tony Reinke
#79. I found out a long time ago that if I indulged by stuffing my face with great food, lying about reading books and watching TV or talking on the phone, I was not a happy camper.
Raquel Welch
#80. Too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people.
Jo Baker
#81. My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.
Josh Radnor
#82. I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me (Rosanne Cash (Musician/Write)
Rosanne Cash
#83. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
Kira Hawke
#84. 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
#85. Books are for reading, not for turning oneself into livestock.
Cassandra Clare
#86. [W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It's the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.
John Waters
#87. No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.
Burton Rascoe
#88. The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your shelf. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm.
Lauren Leto
#89. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#90. After reading a book, you become someone else: Now you are not you, but you plus the book!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. The sessions with Mr. Dubois continued, but it was in the private parlor of Abigail Braddock that Sarah Biddle received the greatest knowledge, for in Mrs. Braddock's private parlor Sarah Biddle learned not only to read books, but also to love them.
Stephanie Grace Whitson
#92. After reading about ten of those self-help books, I saw that they were leading nowhere. They have an immediate effect, but that effect stops as soon as I close the book. They're just words, describing an ideal world that doesn't exist, not even for the people who wrote them.
Paulo Coelho
#93. Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?
Christopher Paolini
#94. How you feel after reading something indicates not what you've read but where you are at.
A.D. Posey
#95. If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.
Jupiter Hammon
#96. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#97. I know they're not actually talking but the books on my desk seem to whisper "Drop what you're doing! Set aside your poetry! Open us, read us! Read slowly while you're at it. Always read us - every day - before you play.
Ed Sanders
#98. Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I've not time to answer all these questions. I've got to get on.'
With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books, she was always at it.
Ruth Rendell
#99. I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.
Janice Galloway
#100. Books should not be loved selfishly. Neither books nor anything else, in fact.
Marie Sabine Roger
