As a follow-up to my Automobile University page.

100 of the Best Quotes About Reading

 

 I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp. —JK Rowling

 

 You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me. —Strickland Gillian

 

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.–Alan Bennett

 

A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.–Neil Gaiman

 

A book is a gift you can open again and again. —Garrison Keillor

 

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.–Salman Rushdie

 

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic. —Carl Sagan

 

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.–Edward P. Morgan

 

A good book has no ending.–R.D. Cumming

 

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.–Gilbert K. Chesterton

 

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.–William Styron

 

A house without books is like a room without windows. —Heinrich Mann

 

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say, “How to Build a Boat.” —Stephen Wright

 

A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever. —Louis L’Amour

 

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read. —Mark Twain

 

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. -PJ O’Rourke

 

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.–P.J. O’Rourke

 

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. –Maya Angelou

 

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.–Author Unknown

 

Are we not like two volumes of one book?–Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

 

Between the pages of a book is a wonderful place to be.–Anonymous

 

Beware of the person of one book.–Thomas Aquinas

 

Books are a uniquely portable magic. —Stephen King

 

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. —E.P. Whipple

 

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.–J.K. Rowling

 

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled. This could change your life.–Helen Exley

 

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.–Abraham Lincoln

 

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. —Emilie Buchwald

 

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy. —Art Spiegelman

 

Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality. —L.R. Knost

 

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.–John Green

 

He that loves reading has everything within his reach. —William Godwin

 

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.–Jorge Luis Borges

 

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.–C.S. Lewis

 

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.–William Lyon Phelps

 

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. —Jorge Luis Borges

 

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.–Neil Gaiman

 

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense. – Harold Kushner

 

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. —Anna Quindlen

 

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.–Woodrow Wilson

 

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.–Oscar Wilde

 

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.–Toni Morrison

 

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.–Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. –Haruki Murakami

 

In a good book the best is between the lines.–Swedish Proverb

 

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.–Oscar Wilde

 

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.–C.S. Lewis

 

It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can. —Jane Hamilton

 

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own. —Katherine Patterson

 

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. —S.I. Hayakawa

 

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

 

It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read.–Judy Blume

 

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. —Kathleen Norris

 

Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.–Maxim Gorky

 

Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. —Voltaire

 

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. —Kofi Annan

 

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.–George Bernard Shaw

 

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.–Ezra Pound

 

No two persons ever read the same book.–Edmund Wilson

 

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.–Frederick Douglas

 

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.–Michael Cunningham

 

One of the greatest gifts adults can give—to their offspring and to their society—is to read to children. —Carl Sagan

 

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. —Groucho Marx

 

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.–Henry David Thoreau

 

Read, read, read. —William Faulkner

 

Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team. —Karen Witemeyer

 

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.–Angela Carter

 

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. – Mason Cooley

 

Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. —Tomie dePaola

 

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Richard Steele

 

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty.  It should be offered to them as a precious gift. —Kate DiCamillo

 

So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky. —William James

 

So many books, so little time.–Frank Zappa

 

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.–Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.–Amos Bronson Alcott

 

The book you don’t read won’t help. – Jim Rohn

 

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.–Oscar Wilde

 

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. —Elizabeth Hardwick

 

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.–Dr. Seuss

 

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.–W. Somerset Maugham

 

There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. -Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

 

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. —Marcel Proust

 

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.–Joseph Brodsky

 

There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.–Josh Jameson

 

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.–Gilbert K. Chesterton

 

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.—Jim Fiebig

 

There is no friend as loyal as a book.–Ernest Hemingway

 

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. —May Ellen Chase

 

There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book. —Frank Serafini

 

There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over.–Gail Carson Levine

 

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. —Victor Hugo

 

We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too.–Anonymous

 

We read to know that we are not alone.–William Nicholson

 

We read to know we are not alone.—C.S. Lewis

 

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. —Austin Phelps

 

What you don’t know would make a great book.–Sydney Smith

 

When you learn to read you will be born again…and you will never be quite so alone again. —Rumer Godden

 

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light -Vera Nazarian

 

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?–Henry Ward Beecher

 

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.–C.S. Lewis

 

You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy books and that’s kind of the same thing. -Anonymous

 

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.–Paul Sweeney

 

Do YOU have some favorite reading quotes? Send them to me to include on this list!