To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.
The man who never reads lives only one.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.
Believe you can and you're halfway there.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.
The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.
Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
or simply:
