Reading Room Quotes

There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

The more you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.