Literary Immersion Quotes

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.

I spent my life in the library reading books.

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

Books bear him up a while, and make him try to swim with bladders of philosophy.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I read my Eyes out, and cant read half enough neither. The more one reads the more one sees We have to read.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad

libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.