Mamacita says: it would do me no good to try and write an introduction to a list of quotations about books and reading, because I’d probably say something about how I consider non-readers to be substandard citizens and card-carrying members of the Stupid Society, and that wouldn’t be conducive to the upholding of my toplofty position as a serene, accepting, kind old lady who loves everybody. Oh, shut up, all that snorting is getting on my nerves. But while I’ve got your attention: Few things make my heart hurt and my brain scream like a person who doesn’t have TIME to read but miraculously has time to watch TV.
1. A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy. –Edward P. Morgan
2. Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. –Author Unknown (But I wish it had been me.)
3. A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. –William Styron
4. There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. –G.K. Chesterton
5. If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. –Toni Morrison
6. A good book has no ending. –R.D. Cumming
7. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. –~Anna Quindlen
8. I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. –Groucho Marx
9. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. –Mark Twain
10. A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. –Charles Lamb
11. I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. –George Robert Gissing
12. Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. –William Hazlitt
13. My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. –Thomas Helm
14. 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
15. 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
16. Lord! when you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. –Christopher Morley
17. The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. –Andrew Ross
18. To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare. –Kenko Yoshida
19. Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. –Jessamyn West
20. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden
21. To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list. John Aikin
22. Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. –George Steiner
23. In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. –Stéphane Mallarmé
24. Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. –James Russell Lowell
25. Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.” –Helen Exley
26. There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. –Jim Fiebig
27. This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. –Elbert Hubbard
28. If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. –Author Unknown
29. Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. –Jesse Lee Bennett
30. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. –Harper Lee
31. When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before. –Clifton Fadiman
32. There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book? –Marina Tsvetaeva
33. Medicine for the soul. –Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes
34. “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread. –François Mauriac
35. Children don’t read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology…. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff…. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don’t expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions. –Isaac Bashevis Singer
36. A house without books is like a room without windows. –Heinrich Mann
37. Never judge a book by its movie. –J.W. Eagan
38. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. –W. Somerset Maugham
39. There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written. –Oscar Wilde
40. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch. –Augustus Hare
41. It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. –Sutton Elbert Griggs
42. Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. –William Ewart Gladstone
43. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. — Oscar Wilde
44. Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. –Margaret Fuller
45. We read to know we are not alone. — C.S. Lewis
46. Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. –Aldous Huxley
47. To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. –Victor Hugo
48. Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. — Mary Schmich
49. Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own. — Charles Scribner, Jr.
50. Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. — Jean Rhys
51. In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. — S. I. Hayakawa
52. Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
53. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. — Ray Bradbury
54. Beware of the man of one book. –Thomas Aquinas
55. The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency–the belief that the here and now is all there is. — Allan Bloom
56. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. — Jorge Luis Borges
57. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. –Joseph Brodsky
58. Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. — Emilie Buchwald
59. There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. — Mary Ellen Chase
60. I often feel sorry for people who don’t read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. — Scott Corbett
Bonus: I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. — Coolio
Mamacita says: I first encountered Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall and Robert Burns’ John Anderson, My Jo in a college course. Unfortunately, the professor was a jaded, bored, boring man who considered himself far too important to be teaching a group of eager undergrads, and who turned every selection into a joke. Both poems, he taught us, were about old people who were about to die. No biggie, that. Death. Common theme. Moving right along. . . .
awful lot about sports and movies and fun, not one of their kids knew anything about poetry, instituted “Culture Night,” wherein each child had to memorize a poem and recite it to the family once a week. It went over like a ton of bricks the first few times, and then took off like a rocket as the boys gradually gained an understanding and appreciation of form, rhyme, meter, patterns, theme, and inner meanings. (