Rhoda Mae > Rhoda's Quotes

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.”
― Susan Wiggs

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”
― Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”
― Simon Van Booy

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Life is too short to read books that I'm not enjoying.”
― Melissa Marr

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
― Louis L'Amour

“I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?

"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“the book I was reading turned out to be crack”
― Elizabeth Norris, Unraveling

“People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.”
― Julie Rugg, A Book Addict's Treasury

“Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.”
― Paxton Hood

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?”
― Shannon Hale, Midnight in Austenland

“I read like the flame reads the wood.”
― Alfred Döblin

“Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry

“إن الكتب مثل الناس فيهم السيد الوقور وفيهم الكيس الظريف وفيهم الجميل الرائع وفيهم الساذج الصادق وفيهم الأديب والمخطئ والخائن والجاهل والوضيع والخليع”
― عباس محمود العقاد

“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow”
― Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile

“The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Antonio-
"Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma."
Peter-
"Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?”
― Kelley Armstrong, Bitten

“The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.”
― Mem Fox, Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.”
― Daniel Ehrenhaft, The Last Dog on Earth

“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Pretjerano čitanje ne čini nas pametnijim. Neki ljudi jednostavno 'gutaju' knjige. Oni to čine bez onih neophodnih intervala razmišljanja, koji su potrebni da se pročitano 'svari', preradi, usvoji, razumije. Kod čitanja lični doprinos je potreban kao što je pčeli potreban 'unutrašnji' rad, pa i vrijeme, da sakupljeni cvijetni prah pretvori u med.”
― Alija Izetbegović, Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Notes from Prison, 1983-1988