Top 100 The Reading Quotes

#1. And, anyway it's not always about fitting in."
"It's not?"
"Nope. Sometimes, it's about reading your environment real quick, and then finding the bits that fit you.

Melissa Keil

#2. When you first read a script is the purest moment. That's when you can understand how an audience will ultimately receive it. The first reading of the script is so important because you're experiencing it all for the first time, and it's then that you really know if it's going to work or not.

David Tennant

#3. The change starts when you start watching a video. You don't see it, you don't feel it but it starts at this moment, just by reading a complicated book or watching a film you again change... It's a fact!

Deyth Banger

#4. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

Jonathan Franzen

#5. 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

#6. I was the quiet kid in the corner, reading a book. In elementary school, I read so much and so often during class that I was actually forbidden from reading books during school hours by my teachers.

Cassandra Clare

#7. It's not simply about reading fairytales as you grow older. It's about still finding the magic in fairytales when the world tells you you're too old to believe either.

Elle Alexander

#8. How can you be so nice to me and how can you forgive me when I've been such a jerk?"
Maddy appears to think for a moment. "When you are reading a book and you finish a chapter, you don't keep re-reading the chapter you just finished. You move on to the next chapter to see what happens.

Stephen Reid Andrews

#9. Sponsored stories are not a great way to monetize mobile traffic. The phone is way more of a publishing tool than a reading tool. The attention users pay to the streams on mobile is far less than on the desktop.

Keith Teare

#10. I'm barely reading the 'New York Times!' But I do try to keep abreast of things.

Chris Diamantopoulos

#11. That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read.

Haruki Murakami

#12. I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

Deborah Harkness

#13. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99

Roger Lowenstein

#14. Being in front of an audience makes me feel alive. Being with friends makes me feel alive. I've done some crazy stuff in my time and yet I can feel infinitely alive curled up on a sofa reading a book. So, what makes me feel alive? I guess it's realizing I am part of the world around me.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#15. Books are a gateway to the extraordinary, a portal for the unfettered imagination and limitless creativity.

Diana Jane Heath

#16. 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

#17. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.

Edgar Allan Poe

#18. How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound?

Daniel Dennett

#19. So you'll have to just trust me when I say that you are worthy, important, and necessary. And smart. You may ask how I know and I'll tell you how. It's because right now? YOU'RE READING. That's what the sexy people do. Other,

Jenny Lawson

#20. He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

Alice Hoffman

#21. 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

#22. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.

Benjamin Franklin

#23. I shall remain on Mars and read a book.

Ray Bradbury

#24. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

Nicholas Carr

#25. 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

#26. My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.

Sarah Dessen

#27. Weren't all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

Cornelia Funke

#28. We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little
set time, set gestures
was like a prayer.

Daniel Pennac

#29. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#30. 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

#31. Once you read a classic, you will start loving even the smell of the books.

Aman Jassal

#32. Cole felt like he'd stumbled into some arcane Templar practise, his sense of ease disappearing the moment the cups were pulled from the shelf.

Danika Stone

#33. The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

David Bailey

#34. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...

Bruno Bettelheim

#35. I have always felt that I understood a phenomenon only to the extent that I could visualise it. Much of the charm organic chemical research has for me derives from structural formulae. When reading chemical journals, I look for formulae first.

Donald Cram

#36. Sometimes I imagine a surveyor 100 years from now reading my plan, retracing my boundaries, and finding the monuments that I set. It's an honor to make a mark in history like that.

Mark Mason

#37. Reading is not work, not a chore, not a drudgery; reading is the most joyful thing, yet, in the world.

James Patterson

#38. She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Sara Sheridan

#39. People only learn through two things. One is reading and the other is association with smarter people

Will Rogers

#40. Do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#41. Tell me what a man does in the matter of Bible-reading and praying, in the matter of Sunday, public worship, and the Lord's Supper, and I will soon tell you what he is, and on which road he is travelling.

J.C. Ryle

#42. Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, I know. I know.

Ann Voskamp

#43. Reading was both a gift and a curse for me. Those books made me able to escape into a world I'd never experienced, but at the same time, they reminded me of all the things I'd been missing.

Brittainy C. Cherry

#44. It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.

S.A. Tawks

#45. Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Ben Okri

#46. Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head - by reading.

Jim Trelease

#47. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus

Adolf Hitler

#48. So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a

Neal Stephenson

#49. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

C.S. Lewis

#50. It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar - a cat reading a map.

J.K. Rowling

#51. I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.

Mal Peet

#52. 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

#53. The world was hers for the reading

Betty Smith

#54. You have to want the book enough to read it.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#55. Wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

John Irving

#56. I love the pleasure of reading poetry.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#57. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.

Carl Sagan

#58. I am to cover the philosophical side of the debate and so far my only thought is that reading keeps you from going gaga.

Mary Ann Shaffer

#59. One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

Scarlett Thomas

#60. Kate was reading through a long diary entry about the first time Katherine
and Matthew had met. Katherine had apparently fallen deeply in lust on the very spot. The entry used the words "delectable,""buttocks," and "I want to bite them.

Lauren James

#61. 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

#62. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.

Tommy Greenwald

#63. Just like I am obsessed with the history of fashion, I love reading about the history of makeup.

Cyndi Lauper

#64. The power of imagination is a miracle.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#65. I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.

Terry Pratchett

#66. Reading a book is like going on a great journey. You don't know what'll happen, but something is bound to change. And for me, that change has always been good.

Shannon Hale

#67. [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

#68. The illusion of randomness gradually disappears as the skill in chart reading improves.

John Murphy

#69. Now I'm reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the

Elena Ferrante

#70. I was getting close to thirty and was trying on the idea of becoming more mature. I was reading more. I had gone out and bought a lot of shirts.

Joe Meno

#71. Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you

Barack Obama

#72. 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

#73. 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.

#74. Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

Henry Seidel Canby

#75. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.

Nick Hornby

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. I read rip-and-read news, but I wasn't a reporter. I was reading the wire, and the other thing was, I was reading commercials - and I could do a hell of a commercial.

Mike Wallace

#79. Your life will be the result of who and what you've been reading and the people you know.

Rui Zhi Dong

#80. He pinched the remaining chapters' pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.

David S.E. Zapanta

#81. After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad.

Spencer Gordon

#82. I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same.

Steven Wright

#83. I can see you, out there, reading between the lines. Come home, stranger. Come home, untangler of my thoughts. Come home and tell me, what do I do with this breaking heart of mine?

Kamila Shamsie

#84. It was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claim to have, while the opposite trend was found for watching television.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#85. 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

#86. take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful.

Plutarch

#87. The most invigorating form of reading matter is, of course, a will.

Nancy Banks-Smith

#88. When I'm not at the keyboard, I'm generally reading, practicing tai chi or middle eastern dance, or cooking.

Sarah Zettel

#89. Did Gran go to a gynecologist? That is totally weird. I never thought about my grandmother's vagina before. I don't want to be thinking about my grandmother's vagina. Not here, at her funeral. In a church. While i'm doing a reading from the Bible.

Meg Cabot

#90. Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book ...

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#91. One of the things that is interesting about reading conspiracy theory is that much of what folks think is conspiracy is really many people acting in concert to make or protect their money.

Catherine Austin Fitts

#92. When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.

Sandra Cisneros

#93. We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it.

Allen Lane

#94. Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

Julia Penelope

#95. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Louis L'Amour

#96. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE ("THE OBJECT") UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Gary Shteyngart

#97. And I think it's because good cons are all based on the victim's need, and the successful con artist is the one, I guess, who can exploit that. I remember reading something about this, that one of the great traits of confidence tricksters is the level that they flatter their victim.

Alfred Molina

#98. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages ... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

Janet Fitch

#99. I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

Jill Scott

#100. 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

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