Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.  --Groucho Marx
 
 
 
 

Readingquote.com welcomes you to its web site featuring words of wisdom and wit about reading, books, literacy, and libraries, from noted quotables including C. S. Lewis, Robertson Davies, Winston Churchill, Anna Quindlen, Jerry Seinfeld, James Michener, and Jim Trelease. Here’s a sampling -- 58 of the 450 quotations collected by Bill Bradfield for pages of
 
 

Published by Dover as an inexpensive paperback ($2.50) in its popular Thrift Editions series, Books and Reading is available from Dover Publications’ online catalog and also through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other online booksellers, and many local bookstores throughout the United States.
 

201. People only learn through two things. One is reading and the other is association with smarter people. -- Will Rogers

202. Books have to be read. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. -- E. M. Forster 

203. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and where is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" -- Lewis Carroll's opening lines of Alice in Wonderland

204. A common complaint is that children's books, especially high-quality picture-books, cost so much. All I can say is that they cost less than a dinner out, or a new pair of jeans. The books I read as a child transformed me, gave meaning and perspective to my experiences. and helped to mould whatever imaginative, intellectual or creative strengths I can lay claim to now. No doll or game had that impact on me, no pair of jeans ever changed my life. -- Michelle Landsberg 
 
 

205.	Child! Do not throw this book about!                    Refrain from the unholy pleasure                    Of cutting all the pictures out!                    Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.                                                         -- Hilaire Belloc

206. It would be a good idea if children would write books for older people, 
now that everyone is writing books for children. -- G. C. Lichtenberg 

207. I read A Wrinkle in Time three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn't bear for it to end. -- Anna Quindlen 

208. Reading about imaginary characters is the greatest pleasure in the 
world. Or the second greatest. -- Anthony Burgess 

209. I enjoy reading biographies because I want to know about the people 
who messed up the world. -- Marie Dressler 

210. From candlelight to early bedtime, I read. -- Thomas Jefferson 
 
 

211.             .

"Of course you know your ABC?" said the Red Queen.          .      "To be sure I do," said Alice.      "So do I," the White Queen whispered. "We'll often say       it over together, dear. And I'll tell you a secret -- I can       read words of one letter! Isn't that grand? However,       don't be discouraged. You'll come to it in time."                                      -- conversation in Lewis Carroll's                            Through the Looking Glass

212. I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget. -- William Lyon Phelps. 

213. The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read. -- Heywood Broun 

214. I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. -- Helen Hanff 

215. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? -- John Ruskin 

216. A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture 
that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of 
his library, where he can get at it if he wants it. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

217. You can't tell a book by its cover. -- English proverb 
 
 

218.	Of splendid books I own no end,              But few that I can comprehend.                                             -- Sebastian Brant

219. I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything. -- John Mortimer 

220. Our grandparents used to say that we must eat a peck of dirt before we die, and they were right. And you must read a lot of rubbish before you die, as well, because an exclusive diet of masterpieces will give you spiritual dyspepsia. How do you know that a mountain peak is glorious if you have never scrambled through a dirty valley? How do you know that your gourmet meal is perfect in its kind if you have never eaten a roadside hot dog? -- Robertson Davies 

221. The worst thing in the world is when records are destroyed. The destruction of the Alexandrian Library and also the destruction of the great libraries in Rome. Those were terrible things, and one was done by the Moslems and the others by the Christians, but there's no difference between them when they're working for propaganda purposes. -- Harry S. Truman; 

222. I've never been much on folklore. It has a perverse way of jumping 
from one region to another by merely changing local names. Fun to read, 
but hard to lay much store by. -- A. C. Greene 

223. A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that 
people are still thinking. And I like the way it breaks down into fiction and 
nonfiction. In other words, these people are lying, and these people are 
telling the truth. That's the way the world should be. -- Jerry Seinfeld 

224. A breakfast without a newspaper is a horse without a saddle. You are 
just riding bareback. Take away my ham, take away my eggs, even my chili, 
but leave my newspaper. -- Will Rogers 

225. There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd 
volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V
for the first time, in a log cabin. -- Alexis de Tocqueville (commenting 
on the reading habits of Americans in his 1840 book Democracy in 
America, vol. 2) 

226. A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath 
in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of 
innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators. 
                                              -- Malcolm Bradbury 

227. I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's 
story, the delicious ache of a last page. I love the wide basket in which 
shining fruits rest together on a table. The sense of gathering, the gleam, 
seems similar to the bounty offered by an anthology. -- Naomi Shihab Nye 

228. Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, 
it should end there. -- Clare Boothe Luce 

229. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. 
                                            -- Logan Pearsall Smith 

230. Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

231. To me the charm of an encyclopedia is that it knows, and I needn't. 
                                         -- Francis Yeats-Brown 

232. Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end. 
                                             -- Peter De Vries 

233. The trouble with contemporary novels is that they are full of people not worth knowing. The characters slide in and out of the mind with hardly a ripple. 
                                             -- Norman Cousins. 

234. A story with a moral appended is like the bite of a mosquito. It bores you, 
and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. -- O. Henry 

235. Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. 
                                              -- Dr. Samuel Johnson 

236. It is the writer's fault, not the reader's, if the reader puts down the book. 
                                               -- David Halberstam 

237. Today's young, expanding imaginations are packed with a far more diverse set of characters and stories than mine was at a comparable age. In the forties my only access to the classics would have been through the always pallid Classic Comics. Now the young imagination is apt to be crammed with characters, both old and new. Odysseus and Don Quixote mix with Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker -- even, soon enough, Bart Simpson and Beavis and Butthead. The story-seeking children of today are far from impoverished. -- Larry McMurtry 

238. As a boy I was saved from a life of ignorance by my little hometown 
library. As a college student I was educated in the stacks of the Swarthmore library. And as an adult I use libraries daily in my search for the facts and the enlightenment I use in writing my books. In fact, I like libraries so much that I married a librarian. 
                                                  -- James Michener 
 
 

239.	LIBRARY               Here is where people,               One frequently finds,               Lower their voices               And raise their minds.                                            -- Richard Armour

240. The big advantage of a book is that it's very easy to rewind. Close it 
and you're right back at the beginning. -- Jerry Seinfeld 

241. The reader cannot create. That has been done for him by the author. 
The reader can only interpret, giving the author a fair chance to make his 
impression. -- Robertson Davies. 

242. 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 

243. To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places. 
On their shelves we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old 
conversation that makes up our civilization. -- Timothy Healy 

244. Normally, the books which do good and the books which healthy 
people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the 
sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering 
when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble 
side. -- Theodore Roosevelt 

245. Kitchen and pantry cabinets can be commandeered in the fight 
to find bookshelf space, and a family's eating habits can be changed. 
When china is displaced by paper plates, there is no longer any reason 
why books cannot be stored in the dishwasher, too. An empty 
refrigerator is an excellent repository for the most valuable of books 
because books like low temperatures best. -- Henry Petroski 

246. When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic 
that I loan it to someone who never brings it back. -- Ed Howe 

247. I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life. 
I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want 
you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with 
the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters. -- Stephen King 

248. Rolando de Agular, executive vice president and chief financial officer 
of Ames Department Stores, a retail discount chain in the northeastern U.S., 
told a Wall Street Journal columnist that he's putting much more time into 
reading and networking to keep up with new trends, adding: "You have to 
be conscious of doing it on a daily basis. A few years ago you could take 
a Peter Drucker book and read it and that could drive you for the next 
five years. Now you take a dot.com book and read it and you better 
read another one six months from now because it will be out of date." 

249. Sunday paper is the worst. Weekend. You want to relax. "Oh, by the way, here's a thousand pages of information you had no idea about." How can they 
tell you everything they know every single day of the week and then have 
this much left over on Sunday when nothing's going on? -- Jerry Seinfeld 

250. This is a book to take with you on a morning's bird-watching 
session or a night of stargazing. Pack it with your picnic on a mountain 
bike, tote it along for beach reading. Press a wildflower between its 
pages, or find a russet-colored autumn leaf for your bookmark. Read, 
think, and meditate upon nature. After all, it's the human thing to do. 
       -- from Holly Hughes' introduction to Meditations on the Earth

251. Reading is the single most important factor in America today . . . 
The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the 
smarter you grow. The smarter you are, the longer you stay in school 
and the more diplomas you earn. The more diplomas you have, the 
more days you are employed. The more diplomas you have, the 
more your children will achieve in school. And the more diplomas 
you have, the longer you will live. -- Jim Trelease 

252. If we could get our parents to read to their preschool children 
fifteen minutes a day, we could revolutionize the schools. -- Dr. Ruth Love 

253. Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has 
to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone 
has to show them the way.  -- Orville Prescott 

254. The best of my education has come from the public library . . . my 
tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents for an overdue 
book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know 
the way to the public library. -- Lesley Conger 

255. Those who do not develop the pleasure reading habit simply don't 
have a chance -- they will have a very difficult time reading and writing 
at a level high enough to deal with the demands of today's world. 
                                               -- Stephen Krashen 

256. The final goal of reading is not merely to derive information from a 
text efficiently but to be able to evaluate that information -- in other words, 
to read critically. Writings speak for their authors, and like other humans, 
authors can be prejudiced, ignorant of important facts and concepts, and 
mendacious -- or wise, honest, knowledgeable, and reliable. A critical 
reader thinks carefully about what he or she reads, evaluates it, tests its 
logic and its facts, seeks its strengths and weaknesses. Critical readers 
learn more and certainly enjoy their reading more than passive readers. 
                                                   -- W. Ross Winterowd 

257. We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar, that we
cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know
ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others,
but of the way things are. -- Harold Bloom

258. I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me -- and as early as 
I begged for it, without keeping me waiting -- into knowledge of the word, 
into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at 
home in time for me to begin to read before starting to school. I believe 
the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for 
traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You 
learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned 
"Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's 
name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost. 
                                                     -- Eudora Welty