Quotes about reading

Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.

Every text assumes a reader.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

One can transform a place by reading in it.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.