With its seemingly endless days and balmy evenings, summer is the perfect time of year to indulge in some leisurely sunlit reading.
We’ve put together some quotes to inspire your summer reading as well as some classic literary quotes for good measure.
“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
“My ideal summer day was reading on the porch.”
— Harold E. Varmus
“I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.”
— Maria Semple
“This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
— Voltaire
“There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.”
— Henry Ward Beecher
“In my college years, I would retreat to our summer house for two weeks in June to read a novel a day. How exciting it was, after pouring my coffee and making myself comfortable on the porch, to open the next book on the roster, read the first sentences, and find myself on the platform of a train station.”
— Amor Towles
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
– John Lubbock, The Use of Life
“And so with the sunshine and with the great bursts of leaves growing on trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”
– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
