Reading Impact Quotes

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

When I finished reading '100 Years of Solitude,' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I got really sad. I thought, 'This will never happen for me, for the first time, ever again.' Then I opened 'Beauty Is a Wound.' It's a completely different story and writing style, but it has a similar place in my heart now.

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?

If your reading habits are anything like mine, then you can remember the exact moment that certain books came into your life. You remember where you were standing and whom you were with. You remember the feel of the book in your hands and the cover, that exact cover, even if the art has changed over the years.

Literature has guided me through my whole life.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.

In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.

Ever read a book that changed your life? Me neither.

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later.

Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

Invariably it turns out to be who you've been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days [on favourite authors