Literary Delight Quotes

The printed page was like wine to me.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

And as for me, thogh that I can but lyte, On bakes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon, That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But hit be seldom, on the holyday; Save, certeynly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules singe, And that the floures ginnen for to springe, Farwel my book and my devocion.

What makes a sentence, a phrase, a moment, or a scene delightful? Something about recognizing the truth in it, hearing the music in it, understanding, intuitively perhaps, that the words are just right. It's not a matter of even context - delight is not limited to scenes or descriptions of happiness or beauty - but of aesthetic appreciation of the thing itself. As a reader, I find it's that moment when I want to stop reading, and also that moment when I know I can't. Delight is that it's what takes me by surprise and reminds me why I love the literary arts above all others.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.

A fine book, in the perfect setting, when there's all the time in the world to read it: Life holds greater joys, but none come to mind just now.

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.

A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

Books can be a source of solace, but I see them mainly as a source of pleasure, personal as well as esthetic.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist.