How Reading Changed My Life Quotes

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed...and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“A book--the book that was, for some reason, THE book--can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens's latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“reading has as many functions as the human body, and... not all of them are cerebral.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“But the ultimate truth is that they aren't dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moors searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is catafalque.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand’s editor should have taken care of).”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life