Elif Batuman Quotes

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.

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

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

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

...next to the pleasure of reading a favourite fishing book comes that of persuading a friend to read it too.

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

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

Of all things I liked books best.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

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.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

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

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books . . . finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams . . . .

I even love the smell of books.

I think so much emphasis these days is placed upon achievement and skill and assessment that the joy has gone out of reading for many kids. Students become distracted by struggling to learn to read or by the pressure to achieve.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

I feel lucky that I read so many books as a kid because I know that no matter how much I appreciate a book now, and I can love a book very much, it's never going to be that childhood passion for a book. There's some element, something special about the way they're reading books and experiencing books that's finite.

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.