Top 100 Reading Life Quotes
#1. The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.
Bill Cosby
#2. The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing.
Louise Erdrich
#3. If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.
Kevin Brockmeier
#4. 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
#5. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
#6. Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.
Juan Enriquez
#7. The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Felix Frankfurter
#8. Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?
Ander Monson
#9. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#11. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#12. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.
Louise Doughty
#13. I've always felt sad for people who don't read fiction; they only get to live one life.
Jack Tyler
#14. Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate.
Baron De Montesquieu
#15. But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.
Anthony Horowitz
#16. Read, read . . . and then read some more. Read everything you can get your hands on! Reading to a writer is as medical school is to a doctor, as physical training is to an athlete, as breathing is to life.
Andrew Joyce
#17. But if I spend [all] my time *reading* about adventures, I won't actually be *having* them.
Lisa Kleypas
#18. The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.
Albert Einstein
#19. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#21. Life involves effort and growth. You won't grow by watching a situation comedy, though you can grow by reading a book. I hope we aren't becoming a nation of watchers, because what made us great is that we've always been a nation of doers.
Ronald Reagan
#22. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#23. 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
#24. What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?
John Cowper Powys
#25. How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#26. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?
Annie Dillard
#27. Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#30. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#32. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#33. And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
Vincent Van Gogh
#34. Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation - a gnawing familiarity - that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.
Kate Bernheimer
#35. Why does everyone think a girl who prefers books to people must be in want of a life?
J
Lauren Morrill
#36. Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#37. As parents, the most important thing we can do
is read to our children early and often. Reading
is the path to success in school and life. When
children learn to love books, they learn to love
learning.
Laura Bush
#38. In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.
Steve Pavlina
#39. 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
#40. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
Francois Truffaut
#41. We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.
Madeleine L'Engle
#42. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
Ayn Rand
#43. 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
#44. Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about
Anonymous
#45. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library.
Avijeet Das
#46. I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Simon Van Booy
#47. She's a lovely young woman from upstate New York, but you should be very thankful for those romance-novel-reading, tween-movie-watching women. They've had a big hand in making our town a success." "And Julian's love life, once he learned to spray himself with glitter.
Kristen Painter
#48. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.
Philip Roth
#49. Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.
Nick Lake
#50. Don't be discouraged or complacent; keep reading it, keep sharing it because it's God's page opened in your life!
Israelmore Ayivor
#51. 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
#52. The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.
Margaret Ayer Barnes
#53. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#54. There is a book for every walk of life. No matter the age, race, or gender there is something that will appeal to you.
Carmela Dutra
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. Each book has a reader, and each reader has a book.
Carmela Dutra
#59. I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that I, having tasted the sweetenes, l may the lesse perceave the bitternes of this miserable life.
Elizabeth I
#60. Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#61. 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
#62. Life is a journey where people travel through each other's memories. If you want to keep a secret well, keep it from yourself
S.E. Sever
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. It is important that you never place limitations on learning, personal growth, traveling, reading and making a positive difference in your life and others.
Tasha Hoggatt
#66. Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?" Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#67. You have to plan it [your devotion to God] every day. And, the best time to plan it is before your day begins. If you don't plan it, your day will plan you. And so, I make a disciplined life of the study of the scriptures, reading the word every day.
Ravi Zacharias
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]
Harper Lee
#71. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.
Ali Smith
#72. Knowledge can be acquired by education, reading, communicating and observing, but also simply by living.
Eraldo Banovac
#74. 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
#75. Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.
S.A. Tawks
#76. Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Charles Scribner Jr.
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Words will change your future
Jade
#81. You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.
Lemony Snicket
#82. Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.
Terry Tempest Williams
#83. If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.
Clive James
#84. Your life will be the result of who and what you've been reading and the people you know.
Rui Zhi Dong
#85. I Prefer Reading Eyes As Eyes Are Very Powerful. It Can Reveal The Ins And Outs of A Man ...
Muhammad Imran Hasan
#86. The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.
Norman Rush
#87. You can Save Time with Writing but you can Save a Life by Reading.
Divya Chawla
#88. I write to get ideas out of my head
Bobbi Kay
#89. She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them?
Austin Wright
#90. The pauper is vulnerable to pride and pride is the destroyer of man's glory.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
#91. I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
Scott Corbett
#92. I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.
Lynda Barry
#93. 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
#94. Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.
Caitlin Moran
#95. Seek to engage yourself in passionate reading.
You will gain better understanding of life .
Lailah Gifty Akita
#96. Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Joseph Addison
#97. All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.
Thomas Swick
#98. 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
#99. Writing is a way of life. I do it because it's a way of experiencing the world, and trying to come to terms with it and understand it and express it and engage with it. And to me it's a natural extension of reading.
Emily Perkins
#100. Life is too short for reading inferior books.
James Bryce
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