Reading Alone Quotes

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

You can't read when you're traveling with other people; it always feels a bit rude.

I love the solitude of being on a plane and finally getting to read an entire book and being left alone.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.

God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.

Often have I sighed to measure By myself a lonely pleasure,- Sighed to think I read a book, Only read, perhaps, by me.

A man, to read, must read alone. He may make extracts, he may work at books in company; but to read, to absorb, he must be solitary.

Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

She was plain and far from skinny or petite. As for parties...she'd rather be alone in a corner somewhere reading. She hated being nice to people she didn't like because her father wanted contributions. She hated being fake. All she wanted was to be herself.

Zadie Smith's 'NW' is keeping me company on my solo travels.