Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

There's a different experience when you're reading a book rather than when you're seeing something on screen. When you're seeing a movie or TV show, it's a three-dimensional experience you're in the middle of, but when you're reading something, you're suppling the reality with your imagination.

Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order.

I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.

... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.

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.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

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

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.