Reading Room Quotes

#1. I found myself facing a Christian Science Reading Room. My God! It had been eight years. There had never been any renunciation of religion on my part, but like so many people, it was a gradual fading away.

Henry Fonda

#2. I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

Jerome K. Jerome

#3. The reading room for suckas," Dr. Tennessee says. "The back stacks where all the good shit hiding.

Daniel Jose Older

#4. On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.

Natasha Trethewey

#5. When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

C.S. Forester

#6. I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

Kenneth Clark

#7. I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

Haruki Murakami

#8. If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

Stephen Leacock

#9. now,
never mind
the boy who came out of that reading room
a new man,
safe in the hope of what was to come
in the summers of his life.

Thabo Jijana

#10. He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.

Robert Harris

#11. Blue had indeed cut herself.

After Adam had gone into the reading room, she'd experimentally opened the switchblade and it had obligingly attacked her. It was just a scratch, really. It barely warranted a Band-Aid, but she put one on anyway.

Maggie Stiefvater

#12. To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

Helen Garner

#13. My strangest auditioning experience was when I was reading for a TV show, and right when I started the audition, the casting director left the room and yelled at me from the hallway to keep reading.

Danny Strong

#14. 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

#15. Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.
Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

Aldous Huxley

#16. I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.

Maria Semple

#17. I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.

Adrienne Rich

#18. Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

Russell T. Davies

#19. Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.

Sonam Kapoor

#20. if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves.

Viktor E. Frankl

#21. I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading.

Petina Gappah

#22. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Groucho Marx

#23. There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.

Thomas Lux

#24. Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

Igor Stravinsky

#25. Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.

Thomas Ehrlich

#26. Reading off a Teleprompter is an easy skill to do passably well and a difficult skill to do very well. I still have room for improvement there. I still talk too fast and I'm trying to slow myself down.

Chris Hayes

#27. With the Cardinals everybody would be reading the business section to see what their stocks were doing. You get to this locker room (Pirates) in the morning and everybody is looking at the sports page to see if Hulk Hogan won.

Andy Van Slyke

#28. My main source of reading is scripts, which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for books.

Josh Hutcherson

#29. I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.

Harper Lee

#30. And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

Vikram Seth

#31. [He] carefully put a funky-looking pair of reading glasses on her. "There we go. How are they?"
She blinked experimentally, peering around the room. "Good, I think. Thank you."
"Wear them the next time we f***. That would be thanking me."
"Aww. You say the sweetest things."
"Don't I?

Kylie Scott

#32. Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Mark Haddon

#33. I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading ... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels.

Michael Riedel

#34. You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room - proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

Aaron Copland

#35. I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#36. Tried to head in the general direction of the bathroom/
The truest room in the whole damn house.

Regina Spektor

#37. The mere thought that she was alone and surrounded by books gave her a near-sensuous thrill. As she looked around her room, dark escaper for the slash of light near her lamp, and saw the vague outlines of her books, she asked herself 'Have I not the whole world?

Andrew Wilson

#38. Once he'd asked, "Don't you want to read? There are hundreds of books in the sitting room."
She had laughed and said, "I've read them all. I want to remember them the way they were. If I read them now, the endings will have changed.

Sarah Addison Allen

#39. There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.

Henry David Thoreau

#40. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

Rachel Kushner

#41. Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

#42. Katherine, I could die horribly here in this chair, and my blood could spray all over the room and cover the pages of that fascinating book you're reading, and I believe, that you'd just wipe the worst away and keep going.

Helen Oyeyemi

#43. Sit in a room and read
and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

Joseph Campbell

#44. But talking to a ghost about a demon when you're in a room full of people who can't see either of them is not to be recommended.

Kerstin Gier

#45. Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!

Fay Weldon

#46. The candle-end had long been burning out in the bent candlestick, casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#47. It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

Brandon Sanderson

#48. I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I'd go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

Neil Gaiman

#49. If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

Cathleen Schine

#50. Oscar was raised to believe that if he stayed in his room reading about made up worlds it meant he didn't appreciate the life he had, the possessions his parents had worked hard for, like the TV and the video and the newly turfed back garden.

Benjamin Wood

#51. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Eudora Welty

#52. 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

#53. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

Anne Tyler

#54. Most of the time, I get auditions for deaf characters where the scene has them communicating in really convoluted ways, like reading lips from across the room when the other person's back is turned or having other people parrot what they say.

Shoshannah Stern

#55. Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.

Elena Ferrante

#56. As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.

Kim Basinger

#57. Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

Antony Sher

#58. I spend most of the afternoon in my room reading about my new book boyfriend, Carter Reed. I swear, Tijan is amazing and I am absolutely in love with Carter.

K. Renee

#59. All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing.

Robert W. Welch Jr.

#60. Often I sit up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.

Benjamin Franklin

#61. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.

Betsy Hearne

#62. It's remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

Brandt Legg

#63. Since I could only take six books per visit from the library, I had to time it right, or I'd be stuck on Sundays rereading the five Reader's Digest Condensed Books sitting on our red laquered living room shelf.

Randy Susan Meyers

#64. It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they'd read me cover to cover as I'd read them.

Riley Redgate

#65. In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

Jane Austen

#66. The family's dream was to see me receive a high degree abroad and to return to become a university professor - on the door to my study room, a sign was placed reading 'Dr. Ahmed,' even though I was still far from becoming a doctor.

Ahmed Zewail

#67. Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.

Virginia Woolf

#68. I'm reading more than ever. I've started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around the room.

Frances Mayes

#69. Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way.

If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I most likely would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary.

Ammon Shea

#70. Our house has a library - it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! - and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There's nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.

Adam Christopher

#71. I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.

Joshua Lederberg

#72. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.

Roald Dahl

#73. As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!

Jan Karon

#74. He eyed in the far corner of the room the carton of books they'd schlepped across the pond(ocean) They were both fearful of being stuck without a decent book, and who knew they would find everything from Virgil to Synge on the shelves of a fishing lodge?

Jan Karon

#75. To be perfectly honest, I think she became sick of Society during her debut season. Better to lock herself in her room with her books than to spend her life paying calls and going to balls.

Shanna Swendson

#76. We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

Joseph Joubert

#77. this art wasn't exactly a novelty for him, and he shyly observed that, having nowhere to go and nothing to do, nor friends to visit, nor any interest in reading books, he usually spent his nights at home, in his rented room, likewise writing.

Anonymous

#78. Four years of sitting in your room reading, and now you're out here with the common folk," I say. "What did inspire you to suddenly make the trip?"

"I would have come sooner," she says, brushing her hair out of her face. "You just never invited me.

Will Leitch

#79. 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

#80. The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#81. I'll have enough books when they fill my room like the stars fill the sky.

E.V. Fairfall

#82. For a storyteller, an open ending leaves much room for imagination; for the inquisitive reader, however, it is a source of great anxiety.

Joyce Rachelle

#83. There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone's house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.

John Waters

#84. My favorite daydream, it was this: I would be reading a book alone in my room, and no one would ever, ever interrupt me.

Ann Tyler

#85. I won't lie. Walking into a room and seeing your girlfriend reading a baby-name book can kind of make your heart stop.
"I'm no expert," I began, choosing my words carefully. "Well - actually, I am. And I'm pretty sure there are certain things we have to do before you need to be reading that.

Richelle Mead

#86. He was seated alone on a lounge chair in the sitting room, his face veiled with a copy of his favourite newspaper, the Guardian, half reading and half listening to Mother.

Chigozie Obioma

#87. She trailed her fingers along the book spines as she wandered around the room. "My father thinks reading is a waste of time." Hunter thought her father was a waste of space.

Larissa Ione

#88. No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#89. The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

Anne Sexton

#90. I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.

Anita Shreve

#91. I always loved watching and reading family-friendly mysteries growing up, like the shows Murder, She Wrote and Nancy Drew, and am thrilled to be bringing these New York Times best-selling books right into your living room on the small screen.

Candace Cameron

#92. It is a sign of intimacy to be able to read in the same room with another person, as trusting as dreaming with someone right beside you.

Laura Furman

#93. Lily opened the door. "Maude, would you - " She cut herself off. Maude was nowhere in sight, but Caliban was across the room, holding a page of her play to the light of the fire. His eyes were intent, his brow slightly creased - and he was quite obviously reading the page.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#94. Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it ... Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

Joan Didion

#95. I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.

Steven Wright

#96. I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness ... It is the inattentive reader
who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.

Michel De Montaigne

#97. I remember the first reading of the script we had and everybody was sitting around the table. I was very impressed with the level of acting that was in the room, particularly with Jennifer who has so much responsibility.

Victor Garber

#98. Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.

Peter Guber

#99. As I look around the quiet room, I see a thousand leather covers like doorways into worlds unknown.

Laura Whitcomb

#100. I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

Eudora Welty