Susan Hill Quotes

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

College inspired me to think differently. It's like no other time in your life.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

I do know great books help shape who I am and how I look at life.

It wasn't until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me... That's when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself, And where we are our learning likewise is.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

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

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

Why do you read many books? The great book is within your heart. Open the pages of this inexhaustible book, the source of all knowledge. You will know everything.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.