Reading English Quotes

#1. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Philip Pullman

#2. Every free minute away from dance (my main focus) I was memorizing new English words, either showering, walking or on the toilet. I started reading English books even though I had very limited vocabulary.

Li Cunxin

#3. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class

Francine Prose

#4. A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Malcolm Gladwell

#5. As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Albert J. Nock

#6. After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin - where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!

Linda Sue Park

#7. I love mystery novels ... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.

Natasha Trethewey

#8. Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.
"To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

Justin Cronin

#9. My favorite subject in high school was English. I love reading and writing, and I felt really supported in this subject, and my least favorite was math, since I felt completely lost.

Christie Laing

#10. But this is exactly why I read
and don't belong to a book group
because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

Peter Orner

#11. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.

Olaf Stapledon

#12. She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#13. I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.

Madhur Bhandarkar

#14. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Virginia Woolf

#15. He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

Katherine Rundell

#16. Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick ... Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history ... should be rendered ... worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

Thomas Jefferson

#17. My mother was an English teacher before she became a full-time mom, and a huge proponent of reading, so she made sure I was an early and vigorous reader.

Matt Wagner

#18. The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

Wilkie Collins

#19. I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

Geraldine Brooks

#20. My wife, the actress Megan Mullally, was an English major at Northwestern University and loves fiction. Like so many things in my life, she curates things for me. For example, I have the daunting prospect of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" waiting for me when I get through my current reading pile.

Nick Offerman

#21. I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

Norman Douglas

#22. Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.

Edward Hirsch

#23. When I was teaching English and trying to get kids passionate about reading, the most effective weapon I had was 'The Martian Chronicles.'

Jack McDevitt

#24. English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen.

Ernest Istook

#25. It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he's reading aloud in class and wants us to think he's moved by the passage.

Tom Perrotta

#26. Welsh poet R. S. Thomas often complained of having to go out and "perform cultural exceses on Saxon territory," the term he used for reading his poems to English sudiences.

R.S. Thomas

#27. I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#28. I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

Kate DiCamillo

#29. I love to write, and I love to read too, but that doesn't mean I like to write about reading - 'cause nothing ruins the fun of reading a good story like the evil English army of Discuss, Analyze, and that hideous duo Compare and Contrast.

Kevin Emerson

#30. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.

Corin Tucker

#31. The way I putted today, I must've been reading the greens in Spanish and putting them in English.

Homero Blancas

#32. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

Stephanie Perkins

#33. Readers have told me that their children have learned to read after years of struggle after starting to read Garfield's comic strip and many people who have moved to the United States have said that they, too, learned English by reading Garfield.

Jim Davis

#34. 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

#35. My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

Kevin Gates

#36. 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

#37. I wasn't that bothered with school; I was too mad into horses. But I liked reading and was good enough at English and always liked music.

Kate Thompson

#38. I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.

Albert Einstein

#39. The documents were in English - sort of - but the language was so convoluted that it was beginning to give her a headache. It made for even duller reading than her chemistry text.

Francine Pascal

#40. 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

#41. Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw

John Irving

#42. Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce

#43. She'd majored in English, hoping that meant she could spend the next four years reading and writing. And maybe the next four years after that.

Rainbow Rowell

#44. I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.
(on reading the Cynewulf lines about the star Earendel)

J.R.R. Tolkien

#45. I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.

M T Anderson

#46. Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

Harold Bloom

#47. What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.

Erin McKean

#48. Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners.

Jeanne M. Dams

#49. He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.

Susanna Clarke

#50. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?

Kenzaburo Oe

#51. I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

Haruki Murakami

#52. The fame of a battlefield grows with its years; Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with the English chivalry upon the white armies of Saladin.

Robert Aris Willmott

#53. He hums a little. He's a really old guy with an English accent, he might have a goatee, and he'll definitely be carrying around a really thick, boring book. You might be able to pry it from his decaying hands and beat him back to death with it. Or maybe just reading it to him would work.

Kasie West

#54. As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Sam Wineburg

#55. One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do) is little more than the naming of parts.

Stephen King