Reading a book is one of my favourite activities. It’s something that can be truly magical; you can be transported to another world, another place or time. You can feel emotions that you’ve never experienced and gain insight into a life that you will never live.
The people who love to read are my favourites because they understand the joy that exudes from the pages of a good book.
These quotes capture that passion for literature.
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…The man who never reads lives only one.” George RR Martin, A Dance with Dragons
- “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t sleep with people who don’t read!” John Waters
- “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)
- “Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.” Author Unknown
- “If a book is well-written I always find it too short.” Jane Austen
- “We read to know that we are not alone.” CS Lewis
- “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled: ‘This could change your life.’” Helen Exley
- “Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” Marcel Proust
- “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” Samuel Johnson
- “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
- “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
- “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Logan Pearsall Smith
- “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
- “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
- “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favourite book.” Marcel Proust
- “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo
- “All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes — characters even — caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.” Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
- “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
- “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” Haruki Murakami
- “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” Joseph Brodsky
Perhaps not a quote that inspires a love of reading in the more intellectual among us, I thought I’d include this as a little bonus…
“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.” George W. Bush
Writers, if you need some inspiration, check out these quotes about writing.
Do you have a favourite quote about reading?