“Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered by learning to read.” –Rebecca West

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde

“I discovered public libraries at this time and read until I was almost drunk on books.” –Barbara Comyns, The Vet’s Daughter

“Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” – John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Books seem the most potent source: Each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I’m hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person in a day.” – Caitlin Moran, How To Be a Woman

“I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between – I gave them all the same rough treatment.” – Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

”Without books, I would have gone insane long ago.” – Damien Echols, Life After Death

“Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit – low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books. ” – Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

“Books. It’s that simple. A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death. ” –J.R. Moehringer, Sutton

“The entire apartment was crammed with piles of old books, often with only the narrowest of pedestrian corridors between them, and these piles were continually being rearranged, relocated, or removed, so that after every nap the cats woke up to an entirely unfamiliar topology, like a tribe dwelling in some impossible mountain range that rumbled every hour with random, hyper-accelerated geological convulsions.” – Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“The harder I work, the more I live.” Indeed.

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you…”

Mid-Week Moment of Zen

The inaugural Riot Read is rolling right along. We’re just past the halfway mark–it’s not too late to join us–and we know you love a good list of literary quotes. So last week, we asked you to share your favorite quotes from the first four chapters of THE GREAT GATSBY. Top off your drink, enjoy this highlight reel, and pop over to the Book Riot forums to continue the conversation.

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

“I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

“Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in the first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“Her voice is full of money.”

“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

“It takes two to make an accident.”

“A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.”

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”

“…there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”

“They’re nice to have — a dog.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

…and my personal favorite: “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

These are a few quotes about reading and writing I’ve recently come across and loved:

“I am writing to apply for the position of bookkeeper. Attached, you will find my list of qualifications. I have been keeping books for four years now, and I am never going to give them back.” - Joey Comeau, Overqualified

“I’m no alien and nobody’s miracle, I’m just a reader right at home.”- Tupelo Hassman, Girlchild

“A mind needs a book as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” - George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“I hear better with a pen in my hand.” – Alan Judd, The Devil’s Own Work

“It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.” – Cathrynne Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“”If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in a coffin, and say, “When you’re ready.”” - David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“The human animal is set apart from other beasts by his infinite capacity for creating fictions.” - Oakley Hall, Warlock

“It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.” – Jo Walton, Among Others

“Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: We’d read.” - Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“She’d been an actress, an artist’s model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.”- Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

10 Quotes of Note

“This is love, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love her presence?” — Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

 “Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” — Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” — Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

“Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox!” — from A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz (quoting his grandfather)

Read the full post for more booktastic quotes.