Pete Hamill Quotes

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

There are essentially two things that will make you wise -- the books you read and the people you meet.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

Your library is your paradise.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Always educate yourself.

I think my parents gave me a love of learning; from there you set out on your own path.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

Take advantage of educating yourself.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

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