27 Quotes About The Joys Of Reading

Reading is a joyous experience, whether you're diving headfirst into a brand new book or rereading an old favorite. It's easy to get absorbed within a world with intriguing characters, high stake situations, and beautiful settings. Like many writers and avid readers have said before, books happens to be a form of magic, a safe place you can escape to, something you can't find anywhere else.

I've loved reading ever since I was able to hold a book up to my face. My older sister used to get upset when I was little because I'd find a way to sneak out of my crib and join my mom and sister while they read bedtime stories together. And as I grew up, I continued to take on as many books as I could read, eventually living part-time at the nearest bookstore and library once I got my own car and paychecks. Reading gave me endless places to travel to, and it fueled me with creativity and inspiration to follow my own passions. If you're like me, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It doesn't matter how many times I hear these quotes on the joys of reading, they'll still warm my heart and bring a smile to my face, and I bet they'll do the same for you. Fill your day with these 27 beautiful quotes on reading from some of the most beloved authors and books of all time:

1. "A book is a dream that you hold in your hand."

— Neil Gaiman

2. "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

3. "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul."

— Joyce Carol Oates

4. "To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."

— Victor Hugo

5. "What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."

— Anne Lamott

6. "When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."

— Maya Angelou

7. "A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

— Madeleine L’Engle

8. "We read to know that we are not alone."

— C.S. Lewis

9. "Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

— Nora Ephron

10. "What is reading but silent conversation?"

— Walter Savage Landor

11. "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

— James Baldwin

12. "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

13. "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

14. "Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

― Gustave Flaubert

15. "Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

16. "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."

― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

17. "Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

— Mary Schmich

18. "Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it."

― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

19. "It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book."

― Nella Last

20. "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book."

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

21. "The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend."

— Oliver Goldsmith

22. "You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."

— Paul Sweeney

23. "Books may well be the only true magic."

― Alice Hoffman

24. "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

―Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

25. "Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

— Hazel Rochman

26. "Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy."

— J.K. Rowling

27. "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

— Frederick Douglass

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