Reading is a classic, go-to hobby that will never go out of style. Check out these beautiful quotes about reading, books and literature appreciation from bookworms just like you!
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“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
Mark Twain
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx)
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
Lemony Snicket (Horseradish)
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
C.S. Lewis
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
Oscar Wilde
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Albert Einstein
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
Oscar Wilde
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
C.S. Lewis
“Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
Lemony Snicket
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
Charles William Eliot
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
William Styron (Conversations with William Styron)
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
C.S. Lewis
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
Gustave Flaubert
“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
George R.R. Martin
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
Voltaire
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
Bertrand Russell
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
Frederick Douglass
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
Fran Lebowitz (The Fran Lebowitz Reader)
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
Jane Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel)
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
Mortimer J. Adler
“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
Anne Tyler
“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
Raymond Carver
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature)
“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.”
Nora Ephron
“The world was hers for the reading.”
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”
Cornelia Funke (Inkspell (Inkworld, #2))
“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
Nicholson Baker (The Anthologist (The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1))
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
James Baldwin
“All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”
Lemony Snicket
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
Saul Bellow
“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
W.G. Sebald (Vertigo)
“My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”
Abraham Lincoln
“A good book is an event in my life.”
Stendhal (The Red and the Black)
“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader)
“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.”
Markus Zusak
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”
Joyce Carol Oates
“If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.”
Audrey Hepburn
“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
Carol Shields (The Republic of Love)
“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
Louis L’Amour (Matagorda/The First Fast Draw)
“When you read a book, you hold another’s mind in your hands.”
James Burke
“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
Stephen King (Skeleton Crew)
“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
Carl Sagan
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham (Books and You)
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)
“A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”
Walter Mosley (The Long Fall (Leonid McGill, #1))
“I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.”
Gary Paulsen
“It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.”
Maureen Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books)
“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
Lemony Snicket
