Top Ten Tuesday – Favourite Quotes About Reading

Top Ten Tuesday is officially on a brief hiatus this week, which means I have free rein. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha… Oh, wait. It’s my blog. I always have free rein…

Ahem. Moving right along. I thought this week I would share some bookish quotes. As in, quotes about reading. And where better to start than with one of my favourite books, Pride & Prejudice? Although she may not have been entirely sincere when she spoke these words, I think Miss Bingley would be most gratified to know how her words have been championed by readers ever since!

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

Perhaps you can agree with this sentiment:

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. ~ Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

And perhaps you may have been guilty of this once or twice:

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. ~ Raymond Carver

Because…

I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book. ~  J.K. Rowling

But they all beg the question: What is so magical about books? Why do we enjoy reading so much? Perhaps some of these quotes will resonate with you:

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.  ~ Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

I get thrills just reading that quote!

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own.  ~ Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

Oh, yes! And speaking of shared humanity:

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, who had ever been alive.  ~ James Baldwin

Maybe you read because one life is never enough:

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.  ~ George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

Or maybe you read because the one life you have is too much:

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.  ~  Nora Ephron

And sometimes, the truth is just this simple:

We read to know we’re not alone.  ~ William Nicholson, Shadowlands

But friends, whatever the reason we read, let us remember the example of Don Quixote:

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.  ~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

😄😄😄

What about you? Which quotes resonate most with you? Why do you read?