By Lois Winston
Ten years ago I received an email that contained a number of quotes about the value of reading. What follows are some of those quotes, along with others I’ve come across. Let’s hear it for reading!
1. 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
2. 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 William Eliot
3. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. -- J.D. Salinger
4. 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
5. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. -- Anna Quindlen
6. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. -- James Baldwin
7. The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours -- Alan Bennett
8. Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. -- Margaret Fuller
9. A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. -- Chinese Proverb
10. Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. -- Abraham Lincoln
11. 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
12. To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. -- Edmund Burke
13. A house without books is like a room without windows. -- Heinrich Mann
14. A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. -- Henry David Thoreau
15. To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. -- Chinese Saying
16. Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books, and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three, and you give me a dangerous enemy mind. -- Anne Rice
17. The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade. -- Anthony Trollope
18. We read to know we are not alone. -- C.S. Lewis
19. No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. -- Confucius
20. The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries. -- Descartes
21. The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. -- Dr. Seuss
22. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested. -- Francis Bacon
23. Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. -- Frederick Douglass
24. Read in order to live. -- Gustave Flaubert
25. A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance. -- Lyndon Baines Johnson
