Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read 'The Jungle' in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peace' - it's like you're in a comedy sketch and you think you're smart.

I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.

Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

We're so used to seeing Agatha Christie's work on screen that going back to the original is a real joy.

A Boosh fan bought me an original copy of 'The Jungle Book' - like, the first print from 1894 - so I've just started re-reading that and am really enjoying it. But the last book I read in its entirety was 'Willard and his Bowling Trophies,' by Richard Brautigan, which is amazing.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

But he thought all the strange words were beautiful, and he had never had a book of his own before.

I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

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

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments.