Celebrating the greatest love of all—reading!

What are your favorite quotes about reading? February 14th always brings with it hearts, candy, and talk of love everywhere. We're dedicating today to our favorite love—and, for some of us, our first love—reading.

Share your favorites here, and I'll kick things off with my own:

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world." —Susan Sontag

I'll be adding our favorites to LT social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr) as well.

"Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower, steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air." - Gwendolyn Brooks

It's on the wall of the Popular Library at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago.

(An aside: Sontag is also the author of another favorite quote of mine, "I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.")

"After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking." --Mr. Scogan (in Huxley's Crome Yellow)

>2 lilithcat: Sontag is just super quotable, isn't she? ;)

Dear Group,
I was a small "WOG" (Latvian) boy when I first started to learn how to read. I was quite sure that I wouldn't learn "John and Betty went up the hill..." or was it
"see spot run..." I do remember crying about my failour. Obviously I survived :-)

ETA. We only spoke Latvian and German at home, thus going to school in the early 1950's was difficult. But kids are "plastic". :-)

" I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them."
LM Montgomery

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. ~Mary Wortley Montagu

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

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." --Marcus Tullius Cicero

>7 tottman: Somehow I'd missed that Groucho Marx quote before. That's delightful.

"A book is a present you can open again and again". (not sure where this is from but it's on a bookmark from a bookstore in California that fell out of a second hand book many years ago)

Also: "You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! Arm yourselves.” - The Tenth Doctor (Doctor Who)

Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it. Of course, you have to read the books, too. Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.--John Waters' Role Models

From Carl Sagan:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

“He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.”
- Barrow

>9 lorannen: I think I saw it on an Amazon bookmark from a long time ago. It stuck with me:)

Mine is actually available in an audio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVz_kJpv-Fs.

>10 Maddz: I believe that's Garrison Keillor: "A book is a gift you can open again and again."

ETA: Granted, it also shows up on things like bookstore posters everywhere, so perhaps it's just one of those excellent sayings. :)

"Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby"
- Jeanette Winterson

>18 Lman: Technically, that's not a quote about reading.

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
- Desiderius Erasmus

>19 jjwilson61:... really?
Did the collecting word give it away?

Seriously...

>21 Lman: Sorry, just trying to poke a little fun.

“We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”
― B.F. Skinner

""It has been said that man is distinguished from animal in that he buys more books than he can read."
Edward Lasker

" Lord Macaulay has a passage in which he contrasts the pleasures which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to which he may be put by his acquaintances. "Plato," he says, "is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet." I dare say I might differ from Lord Macaulay in my estimate of some of the writers he has named, but there can be no disputing his main proposition, namely, that we need have no more trouble from any of them than we have a mind to, whereas our friends are not always so easily disposed of."
Samuel Butler

I'm guessing Edward Lasker didn't have a dog so voracious as to eat everything within reach, i.e. more than he could easily digest. I'm guessing as well that Edward Lasker knew full well that animals i.e. other animals don't read books & so are rarely seen buying them, never mind too many of them.

'Books are the first instructors, and often the final friends.'
--Paul Christian

One to take notice of in a 2nd-hand bookshop might be The Pleasures of Literature and the Solace of Books, an obscure (early 20th/v. late 19th century?) collection of quotations about books; the original edition is as nice to look at as it is to read.

"Books to the Ceiling, Books to the Sky
My pile of Books Are a Mile High!
How I Love The! How I Need Them!
I'll Have a Long Beard by the Time I Read Them!"
~Arnold Lobel

Which is in my profile, and I came across it on LT somewhere, but sadly didn't mark the thread.

Courtesy of the ever-familiar Mr Bartlett:

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good.
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
- William Wordsworth

But:

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man can not live without cooks.
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?
- Bulwer Lytton

My wife volunteers at one public library that had a little "Thank You" breakfast and this quote by Mark Twain attached to a little gift may not be exactly along the line of this thread but I love it anyway!!! I don't know which book or article it came from.

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."

All I can say is "yup!"

I love and live by the Kafka quote:

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

As an avid reader, I found these words to be golden:

“Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”
― Joseph Campbell,

"The world must be all f*cked up," he said," when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I walked past a poster with this quote everyday for about a month and never got tired of it!

“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.”

― Markus Zusak

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
-- A.E. Newton

>33 staffordcastle: I'm too tired right now to do it justice, but I love that quote.

>34 Foretopman: ditto!