100 Unforgettable Quotes About Reading

100 Unforgettable Quotes About Reading

by Jaylynn Korrell

Get inspired (& inspire!) with these brilliant quotes about books & reading.

People have loved books for centuries. And I don’t blame them! These things are portals, mind-reading devices, time-traveling phone booths, and information troves. You can fall in and out of love with books throughout your life, but, as long as you don’t live with Montag and Clarisse McClellan, they’ll always be there waiting to blow your mind.

And just as long as books have been around, people have been expressing their love for them. Authors, experts, world leaders, and beyond, people have been using their own love of the written word to inspire others to dive into the deep, wonderful world of them. The more book lovers, the better.

So whether you’re just looking to get inspired, to find new content for your Bookstagram, to include them in your essays for your English class, or to use them for your classroom as an English teacher, you’ve got options with these quotes about reading.

Here are some of our favorite reading quotes!

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Quotes About Reading

1. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James Baldwin

2. “What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.” ― Oprah

3. 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

4. “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” – Descartes

5. “You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.” ― Paul Rand

6. “Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn’t worth re-reading.” – Susan Sontag

7. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

8. “Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham

9. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” ― Henry David Thoreau

10. “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the most social pastime.” ― Audrey Hepburn

11. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin 

12. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

13. “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman

14. “I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.” – David Foster Wallace

15. “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” – Jean Rhys

16. “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise about the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn

17. “Once you’ve read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” — Louis L’Amour

18. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis

19. “You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend” — Paul Sweeney

20. “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”― Voltaire

21. “You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”― Pat Conroy

22. “The world was hers for the reading.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

23. “My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”— Malcolm X

Guess what? We’ve got a killer list of gifts for English teachers too!

24. “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

25. “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”― Fernando Pessoa

26. “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”― John Locke

27. “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”― Francois Mauriac

28. “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”― W. Somerset Maugham

29. “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” =―Mary McLeod Bethune

30. “I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else’s story, the delicious ache of a last page.”―Naomi Shihab Nye

31. “Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.”― Khaled Hosseini

32. “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”―Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas

33. “Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”— Raymond Carver

34. “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” ―Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

35. “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”— Harold Bloom

36. “Just because you’re a slow reader doesn’t mean you’re a bad one.” — Joe Walters, founder of Independent Book Review

37. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”―Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

38. “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” — Mary Wortley Montagu

39. “Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”— Mark Haddon

40. “It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.” – S.I. Hayakawa

Quotes About Books

41. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”― Ray Bradbury

42. That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” — Jhumpa Lahiri

43.“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Lemony Snicket, Horseradish 

44. “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” — Austin Phelp

45. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”― Ernest Hemingway

46. “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

47. “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’”― Helen Exley

48. “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” — J.K. Rowling

49. “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

50. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” — Carl Sagan

51. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” ― Cicero

52. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one, you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” ― Ernest Hemingway 

Don’t forget gifts for librarians this year!

53. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” — Annie Dillard

54. “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” — Roald Dahl

55. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

56. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion

57. “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” — George Orwell, 1984

58. “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” — Sir Francis Bacon

59. “Books may well be the only true magic.” — Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons

60. “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ― John Green

61. “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”― Joseph Joubert

62. “Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” – Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

63. “The problem with books is that they end.”― Caroline Kepnes, You

64. “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

65. “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”― Diane Duane

66. “Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” ― Voltaire

67. “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ― Abraham Lincoln

68. “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” ― Jules Verne

69. “Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.” ― Mark Twain

70. “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”― Stéphane Mallarmé

71. “Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.” ― Toni Morrison

72. “Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.” ― Dave Eggers

73. “I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books.” ― Abraham Lincoln

74. “Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.” ― Adelise M. Cullens

75. “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” ―Carlos Ruiz Zafón

76. “I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.” ― Nnedi Okorafor

77. “A thing about books is that they take the same amount of time to read whether you don’t like them at all or if they change your life forever.” — Joe Walters, founder of Independent Book Review

78.  “There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all.” — Jacqueline Kennedy

79. “What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” — Sherman Alexie

80. “I guess there are never enough books.” — John Steinbeck

81. “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” — Charles W. Eliot

82. “Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.” — George R.R. Martin

Geared Toward Kids

83. “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them.“ ― Judy Blume

84. “Reading aloud to your children is a gift that will last a lifetime.” ― Maya Angelou

85. “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss

86. “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” ― Napoléon Bonaparte

87. There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. — May Ellen Chase

88.“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” ― C.S. Lewis

89. “I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” ​​― Maya Angelou

90. “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” — Kate DiCamillo

91. “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” — Ursula K. LeGuin

92. “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”— Victor Hugo

93. “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” — Arthur Conan Doyle

94. “There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.” – Frank Serafini

95. “Reading is the gateway for children that makes all other learning possible.” ― Barack Obama

96. “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”― Maya Angelou

97. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” ― Walt Disney

98. “Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait in line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.” ― David Levithan

99. “Books break the shackles of time―proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

100. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein

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Have you heard these quotes about reading before? Some are old favorites, and some are new. What are your favorites?

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About the Author

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