Arthur Helps Quotes

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.

She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she'd checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

I used to read every, well, most nights. I think reading helps me in terms of relaxing... It helps me to get my mind off the game a little bit more and it helps me to be a little bit more focused.

Dad is always hiding in his book.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Reading, not just an escape, but an exercise in living.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

I suppose books mean more than people to me.

I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.

One can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a good book.

A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.

Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.

It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book...from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.