Reading quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside reading — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever."
"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud."
"There’s the feeling, and the right reading - that’s all you really need to know; the right light and the feeling."
"Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt or a sense of humor."
"I boast of being the only man in London who has been bombed off a lavatory seat while reading Jane Austen. She went into the bath; I went through the door."
"I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search constantly deeper and deeper for it. My temptations did that for me, for no one can understand Holy Scripture without practice and temptations...I t is not by reading, writing, or speculation that one becomes a theologian. Nay, rather, it is living, dying, and being damned that makes one a theologian."
"A great variety of reading confuses and does not teach. It makes the student like a man who dwells everywhere and, therefore, nowhere in particular."
"The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart."
"It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority.... I worked probably 25 years by myself.... Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public."
"I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings."
"My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading."
"A person can do a lot of reading and research as I have done. I went to Spain and spent a whole summer there with my family, immersing myself in the culture. But all that isn't really necessary to experience the music."
"I'm always reading. Here's where an ebook reader really comes into its own. When I travel, it allows me to carry a huge chunk of my library with me. Usually, when I am writing one project, I am researching the next or beginning to pull together the material for the book after that."
"I'm always writing - its what I like to do. But when I'm not writing, I'm reading."
"All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me."
"I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion."
"Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn't pass my friend's sixth-grade class."
"Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing."
"This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion."
"I'm not reading any kind of fantasy [for young adults] or Hunger Games or anything like that. It's more just like geeks with crushes. It's very sweet, and I'm enjoying how honest they are, and I'm enjoying the humanity in them."
