Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Quotes About Books and Reading

The topic for this week’s Top Ten Tuesdays is “Quotes From/About Books (Share book quotes you love, quotes about being a reader, etc.)”

Once upon a time, I had a really good list of these going–and I have no idea what happened to that (it was before this blog). But I do have a decent collection of quotations that I’ve used once or twice over the years in my Saturday Miscellany posts, so I picked the ten best of those.

Top Ten Quotes About Books and Reading

(alphabetically by author)

	“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Alan Bennett (Source)
	I love people who read. I think it screams humility. When someone reads, they are essentially admitting they want more, that the world is not enough for them. They want more knowledge, more experience. Whatever this life is, they want more of it. – Nicholas Browne (Source)
	I couldn’t decide which one of these to keep; they’re variations of the same idea, so I’m sticking with them both. The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards. – Umberto Eco (Source) I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me. – Abbas Al-Akkad (Source)
	Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. — Gustave Flaubert (I don’t remember where I got this image)
	“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books—even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome” The Right Hon. William E. Gladstone Prime Minister. UK, 1809-1898 (Source)
	At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.” ― Alberto Manguel (Source)
	When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness. Jules Renard (Source)
	Reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Wislawa Szymorska (Source)
	“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them–with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.” ― Eudora Welty (Source)
	Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.― Virginia Woolf (Source)