Top 100 Quotes About Reading Literature
#1. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Stephen Greenblatt
#2. To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.
Nicole Krauss
#3. I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?
Nick Hornby
#4. I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.
Richard Ford
#5. My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#6. Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#8. The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X
#9. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows
Joseph Patrick Pascale
#10. From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.
Jacqueline Woodson
#12. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#13. Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Adriana Trigiani
#14. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#15. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#16. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
#17. Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.
Amy Joy
#18. People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.
Jonathan Ames
#19. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#20. The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
#21. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
Jamie L. Harding
#22. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
#23. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.
Val Kilmer
#24. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
#25. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#26. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#27. If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Franz Kafka
#28. Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.
Terry Tempest Williams
#29. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#30. Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.
Sophie Dash
#32. 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
#33. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Louis L'Amour
#34. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#35. She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.
Pat Conroy
#36. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#37. Reading is for pleasure; it's not another form of social competition. Leave those literary Joneses to it.
Heather Reyes
#38. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#40. 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
#42. I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.
Elle Macpherson
#43. Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
#44. That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.
Sophie Divry
#45. 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
#46. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
#47. 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
#48. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
#49. As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.
William Shakespeare
#50. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Stephen R. Covey
#51. Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand - not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn't advanced enough.
Leonard Susskind
#52. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12
Sarah Arthur
#53. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
#54. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#55. I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
Ken Thompson
#56. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.
Maria Kodama
#57. Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.
Jennie Chancey
#58. I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing.
Julia Glass
#59. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#60. Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#61. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
#62. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
#63. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#64. 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
#65. Give yourself to reading.' ... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,
especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#66. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#67. I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
Pat Conroy
#68. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross Macdonald
#69. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#71. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
Annie Dillard
#72. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#73. When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.
Terry Hayes
#75. Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
Ruth Ozeki
#76. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
#77. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#78. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
#79. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#80. 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
#81. Books do pretend ... but squeezed in between is even more that is true - without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
Matthew Pearl
#82. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
James W. Sire
#83. To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
#84. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
Bohumil Hrabal
#85. 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
#86. Amie frowned. 'That's what I can't figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It's sick, really.
Jennifer Silverwood
#87. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
Susan Sontag
#88. 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
#89. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
Raymond Chandler
#90. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
James W. Sire
#91. I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
Vladimir Putin
#92. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense ... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
Georgette Heyer
#93. Minimalism is close to mediocrity and mindlessness, a way for the ungifted to have a literary career, and for readers who really hate literature to pretend to be reading something serious.
Paul West
#94. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
C.S. Lewis
#95. Books should not be loved selfishly. Neither books nor anything else, in fact.
Marie Sabine Roger
#96. The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
Bruno Bettelheim
#97. I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
Janet Fitch
#98. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#99. The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
Ross Macdonald
#100. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
