"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." Italo Calvino 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels.
"A good book has no ending." RD Cumming, author
"A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it." William Clark Styron Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke (born November 14, 1947) is an American political satirist and journalist.
"Books are great! They're so easy to rewind. Just close the book and you're right back at the beginning." Unknown
"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn." Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician.
"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Their authors are a natural and irresistable aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings and emperors, exert an influence on mankind." Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. (Thank you, friend Katharine, for sharing this and other quotes with me.)
"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." Emilie Buchwald, children's author
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. This was found in the book To Be Where You Are, a book in The Mitford Series, by Jan Karon
"Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a book."Thomas à Kempis, ( c. 1380 – 25 July 1471) was a German/Dutch canon regular of the late medieval period and the author of The Imitation of Christ, one of the most popular and best known Christian books on devotion. His name means Thomas "of Kempen", his hometown.
"I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson, (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American lawyer and Founding Father, and principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776). He was elected the second Vice President of the United States (1797–1801) and the third President (1801–1809).
"I have just four words to leave with you. Four words that have spoken volumes of truth into my life. In everything, give thanks." Father Timothy Kavanagh, a character in Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon (1 Thessalonians 5:18 In everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.")
"I love the smell of book ink in the morning!" Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor.
"I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading." John Adams, (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American lawyer, author, statesman, and diplomat. He served as the second President of the United States (1797–1801), the first Vice President (1789–1797] and as a Founding Father was a leader of American independence from Great Britain.
"I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book." Julius Henry Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), known professionally as Groucho Marx, was an American comedian, film and television star.
"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition." Winston Churchill, (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955.
"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads but what he rereads." Francois Mauriac (1885–1970), French novelist, playwright, and critic.
"In a good book, the best is between the lines." Swedish proverb - This quote was found in A Common Life, a book in The Mitford Series by Jan Karon
"It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them somthing 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 Womeldorf Paterson (born October 31, 1932) is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels.
". . . it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it." Jane Austen, (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist
"It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet.
"I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All wit one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books."
Janice James
"Lewis thus insists that texts challenge us as much as they inform us. Insisting that the text conform to our presuppositions, to our way of thinking, is to force it into a mold of our own making, and deny it any opportunity to transform, enrich, or change us. Reading works of literature is about 'entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience' of other people. It is about what Plato termed psychagogia - an 'enlargement of the soul,' " Author Alister McGrath writing in C. S. Lewis - A life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
"Literature is meant to help us see the world through other spectacles, to offer alternative ways of undstanding things." Allister McGrath, author, in C.S. Lewis
"Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. It opens our eyes, offering new perspectives for evaluation and reflection." author Allister McGrath in C.S. Lewis
"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Anglo-Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture, and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.
"Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf." Emilia Clarke's, an English actress', dad.
"No two persons ever read the same book." Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer and critic. (Nor does any one person ever reread the same book! Timothy Kavanagh, character in Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon)
"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors." Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician.
"Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." Julius Henry Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), known professionally as Groucho Marx, was an American comedian, film and television star.
"Read, read, read." William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays.
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician.
"Since we cannot read the literature of the future, we can at least read the literature of the past, and realize the powerful implicit challenge that this makes to the ultimate authority of the present. For sooner or later, the present will become the past, and the self-evident authority of its ideas will be eroded - unless that authority is grounded in the intrinsic excellence of those ideas, rather than their mere chronological location." Author Allister McGrath writing in C.S. Lewis, (born 23 January 1953) is a Northern Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian, scientist, and Christian apologist.
"Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends." Dawn Adams (Or Dawn Addams?)
"Summer reading is different. There's no agenda, nothing assigned, nothing mandatory. One reads at one's own pace - a few pages now and then, or a sudden all-day binge." Author George Howe Colt writing in The Big House
"That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit." Amos Bronson Alcott ( November 29, 1799 – March 4, 1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a vegan diet before the term was coined. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights.
"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer.
"The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go."
Theodor Seuss Geisel ( March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991)was an American writer, cartoonist, animator, book publisher, and artist best known for authoring children's books under the pen name Dr. Seuss.
"The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read." Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a renowned polymath and a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.
"The white spaces between words are more important than the text, because they give you time to think about shat you've read." Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) - Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) was an American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was known as the creator, composer, producer, head writer, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968–2001). The program was marked by its slow pace and its host's calm manner.
"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922), better known as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist.
"There is another way of visiting a foreign country, and a correspondingly different way of reading an older text. Here, the tourist eats the local food and drinks the local wine, seeing 'the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants.' As a result, Lewis argues, the English tourist comes home 'modified, thinking and feeling' in different ways. His travel has enlarged his vision of things." Taken from the book C. S. Lewis a Life by Alister McGrath; The point that C. S. Lewis was trying to make by using a familiar cultural stereotype of the English tourist is "that to understand the literature of the classical or Renaissance periods, it is necessary to 'suspend most of the responces and unlearn most of the habits' that result from 'reading modern literature' such as an unquestioning assumption of the innate superiority of our own situation.
"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." W. Fusselman (Little is known of W. Fusselman. It's believed W. Fusseslman was a student at West Orange Essex County Vocational School in 1926 when a teacher, Max S. Henig, sent in 43 library slogans from his students to the Neward Public Library.)
"We must allow the text to interrogate and expand our experience. Rather than trying to get rid of a medieval knight's suit of armor so that he becomes just like us, we should try to find out what it is like to wear that armor." Allister McGrath, author, in C.S. Lewis
"We read to know we are not alone." Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist.
"Wear the old coat and buy the new book." Austin Phelps (January 7, 1820 – October 13, 1890), was an American Congregational minister and educator.
"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them, to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!" Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris, (born August 7, 1953 in New York City) is an American essayist and reporter. Her interests include literary journalism, essays, memoir, and autobiography.
"When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day." Jean Fritz
"When I examine myself and my method of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge." Albert Einstein as quoted by Jessye Norman in an address to Harvard/Radcliffe alumni June 6, 1997 (Shared by Katharine Harding)
"You really can't make people read . . . But books are patient. They wait for the reader. They are always there, so there will always be hope." John Updike as quoted in the Oregonian interview March 17, 1996 (Shared by Katharine Harding)