Top 500 Reading Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “To get to where you want to be in the next 5 years, you are either reading the right books or you’re not.”

— Jim Rohn

202. “In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

203. “Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”

— Brandon Sanderson

204. “Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.”

— Ben Carson

205. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

— Terry Pratchett

206. “The art of reading is to skip judiciously.”

— Alexander Hamilton

207. “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.”

— Louisa May Alcott

208. “I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

— Markus Zusak

209. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”

— Heinrich Heine

210. “All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

— Roald Dahl

211. “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

— Steven Wright

212. “Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.”

— Nora Ephron

213. “When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that’s all there was.”

— Oprah Winfrey

214. “As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”

— Toni Morrison

215. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.”

— Anna Quindlen

216. “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”

— Lisa Kleypas

217. “Of all things, I liked books best.”

— Nikola Tesla

218. “Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”

— Anne Brontë

219. “In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Annie Dillard

221. “Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.”

— Stephen King

222. “She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”

— Dean Koontz

223. “My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I’m quite prone to such bouts of deplorability – take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

— Brandon Sanderson

224. “If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

— Ben Carson

225. “I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”

— Gary Paulsen

226. “The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.”

— Neil Gaiman

227. “I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”

— Oscar Wilde

228. “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

229. “Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.”

— Voltaire

230. “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.”

— Anna Quindlen

231. “Books were my pass to personal freedom.”

— Oprah Winfrey

232. “I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.”

— Neil Gaiman

233. “Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.”

— Lloyd Alexander

234. “Both reading and writing are experiences – lifelong – in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.”

— Eudora Welty

235. “Literature is news that stays news.”

— Ezra Pound

236. “Constant reading will pull you into a place – a mind-set, if you like the phrase – where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.”

— Stephen King

237. “If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.”

— Anne Frank

238. “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”

— Bell Hooks

239. “Reading gave me hope.”

— Oprah Winfrey

240. “One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.”

— John W. Gardner

241. “I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.”

— Terry Pratchett

242. “What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, – for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”

— Henry David Thoreau

243. “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

244. “The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life.”

— George R.R. Martin

245. “Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

— Virginia Woolf

246. “Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.”

— Brandon Sanderson

247. “The fact that people are already reading and loving something I wrote is still hard to believe.”

— Erin Morgenstern

248. “I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.”

— Steven Wright

249. “The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings.”

— Joseph Campbell

250. “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

— Rumi