Famous Quotes & Sayings

A. C. Benson

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Adrienne Rich

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

Agatha Christie

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Adriana Trigiani

I even love the smell of books.

Adora Svitak

I was thrilled to be able to read at three. I just thought everyone loved reading as much as I did.

Adam Weishaupt

By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.

Adam Young

Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win.

Adam Gopnik

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Abraham Lincoln

A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Harold Bloom

I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,

Alice Walker

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

Alice James

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

Alice Munro

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

Alice Hoffman

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Alice Hoffman

Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

Anne Michaels

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

Anne Lamott

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

Anne Lamott

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Alane Ferguson

Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down!

Alastair Reynolds

How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’ ‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.

Albert Bushnell Hart

'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.

Albert J. Nock

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Annie Besant

Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his 'Lamentations' are really not worth reading.

Annie Dillard

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Annie Dillard

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Annie Dillard

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Annabelle Selldorf

There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.

Claire Danes

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

Claire Danes

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

Daniel J. Boorstin

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'

Daniel J. Boorstin

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.