Reading has the power to open new worlds, spark imagination, and offer fresh perspectives. Whether you're a lifelong book lover or just beginning to explore the joy of reading, inspiring quotes can deepen your appreciation for the written word. In this collection, we've gathered 71 of the most captivating and thought-provoking reading quotes to motivate you to pick up a book and dive in. Let these words fuel your passion for stories, knowledge, and the endless adventures found within pages.
1. “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
2. “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
3. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” - Charles T. Munger
4. “A book is like a key that fits into the tumbler of the soul. The two parts have to match in order for each to unlock. Then—click—a world opens.” - Brad Kessler
5. “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
6. “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
7. “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
8. “The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.” - Wallace Stevens
9. “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
10. “And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.” - George Orwell
11. “If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.” - Tiffany Madison
12. “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
13. “Never read a book that is not a year old.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. “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
15. “"Since I could only take six books per visit from the library, I had to time it right, or I'd be stuck on Sundays rereading the five Reader's Digest Condensed Books sitting on our red laquered living room shelf.” - Randy Susan Meyers
16. “My books are a word feast.” - Lori R. Lopez
17. “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
18. “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
19. “You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
20. “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
21. “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
22. “People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.” - Julie Rugg
23. “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
24. “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
25. “She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn't get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn't do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more, till it was time to go home.” - Susan Coolidge
26. “You're never alone when you're reading a book.” - Susan Wiggs
27. “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
28. “La lumière est dans le livre. Ouvrez le livre tout grand. Laissez-le rayonner, laissez-le faire.” - Victor Hugo
29. “Life is too short to read books that I'm not enjoying.” - Melissa Marr
30. “Never judge a book by its "spine".” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
31. “[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.” - Simon Van Booy
32. “She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.” - Jeffrey Eugenides
33. “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
34. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” - George R.R. Martin
35. “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
36. “Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading because we bring a different person to it. It is not you who reads the book, the book reads you” - Jack Lasenby
37. “Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble.” - Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
38. “Deep layers of context are missed when cursorily reading for quantity at the expense of comprehension - only the vapid are impressed by those who try to squeeze as many books as possible into each passing month as if shoving one more oiled hot dog down the gullet in a food eating contest to prove accumulation superiority.” - Wil Zeus
39. “Books don't change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences.” - John Piper
40. “In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.” - Kate Kerrigan
41. “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
42. “There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.” - Nora Ephron
43. “(...) perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.” - Terry Pratchett from his novel Soul Music
44. “This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.” - John Hodgman
45. “...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.” - Karen Armstrong
46. “You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman.""Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep I followed them.” - Ray Bradbury
47. “If the eye really was a muscle, I had pulled it long ago.” - Brodi Ashton
48. “Books fall open, you fall in” - David McCord
49. “And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss.” - Libba Bray
50. “We may need to put down the book from time to time, but we should make sure not to let the computer become the new book. The universal medium, like the universal library, is a dream that does more harm than good.” - Andrew Piper
51. “Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.” - Virginia Woolf
52. “I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
53. “I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.” - Anne Fadiman
54. “Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey -- it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done.” - Jonathan Carroll
55. “Only because books are better than people, Father. ... Because they are masters who instruct without a rod. If you approach them, they are never asleep; if you are ignorant, they never laugh; if you make mistakes, they never chide. They give to all who ask of them, and never demand payment. ... All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, if God hadn't provided us with the remedy of books.” - Catherine Jinks
56. “Hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin pájaros; hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin agua; en lo que a mi se refiere, soy incapaz de imaginar un mundo sin libros.There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; but in my case I am unable to imagine a world without books.” - Jorge Luis Borges
57. “Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.” - A.A. Patawaran
58. “And because the world is too big and time is too short and you only have one life to live, read!” - A.A. Patawaran
59. “The stories she'd read of others' lives over these last few months had left her with a greater appreciation for the thread of her own life.” - Masha Hamilton
60. “There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others…” - Chris Geiger
61. “I prefer the company of books. When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you're having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train thought and you accompany each other for weeks on end.” - Sophie Divry
62. “One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.” - Alan Bennett
63. “Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.” - Jo Walton
64. “Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.” - Tomie dePaola
65. “Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.” - Danny Tyran
66. “Drop everithing and read.” - Emma Roberts
67. “You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.” - Cassandra Clare
68. “Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.” - Bohumil Hrabal
69. “This book is a treasure; I did not suspect it would be so good when I picked it up, but now I can feel the printed words seeping through my skin and into my veins, rushing to my heart and marking it forever.I want to savor this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again.” - Laura Nowlin
70. “Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.” - Jessica E. Larsen
71. “There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!” - E.A. Bucchianeri
