Reading Quotes - Page 18

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead.

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

You are not permitted to suffer what others suffer, you are not permitted to fail or die young.

I often buy print books only after I've read them in some digital form or other. It's my odd way of keeping the physical presence of the best among multitudes. And I only have one shelf.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

YOU’RE READING. That’s what the sexy people do.

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

For me, reading begins at home.

It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.

Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.

Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

I work backwards with the ending in mind as I create art, stories, poems and books. Always in a process of becoming.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language not set its style.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

We are not reading books merely to check off a list or to be able to say we have read them. We are reading to grow as persons, to know more that we may understand more, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, to act according to our greater wisdom.

Dr. Manning said he'd thought at first it might be sleeping sickness, or even narcolepsy, whatever that was, but - no, Pete was healthy enough physically. Manoel growled that the boy was bone-lazy, spending his time fishing and reading. Reading! No good could come of such things.'In a way you're right, Manoel,' Dr. Manning said hesitantly. 'It's natural for a boy to day-dream now and then, but I think Pedro does it too much. I've let him use my library whenever he wanted, but it seems... h'm... it seems he reads the wrong things. Fairy tales are very charming, but they don't help a boy to cope with real life.''Com certeza,' Manoel agreed. 'You mean he has crazy ideas in the head.''Oh, they're rather nice ideas,' Dr. Manning said. 'But they're only fairy tales, and they're beginning to seem true to Pete. You see, Manoel, there are really two worlds, the real one, and the one you make up inside your mind. Sometimes a boy - or even a man - gets to like his dream world so much he just forgets about the real one and lives in the one he's made up.''I know,' Manoel said. 'I have seen some who do that. It is a bad thing.''It would be bad for Pete. He's a very sensitive boy. If you live too much in dreams, you can't face real life squarely.'("Before I Wake...")

The imagination gland doesn't die. It just becomes reliant on manufactured spirit.

Be great, read great books.

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit.

Rereading, we find a new book

Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.

Why does it scare me to think I might be ordinary? I remember when I started first grade and I could hardly pay attention for fear I wouldn't learn to read and write. I didn't want to be like everyone else. I didn't want to have to learn. I wanted to know everything already

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

If a book doesn’t inspire you to read more, it was not worth read.

I wanna say something that I want you to remember for the rest of your life, OK? I want you to listen closely. I'm giving you a key to life right now, this is the key to life. The key to life, the key to life is running and reading. Oh right? Now listen very seriously, the key to life is running and reading. Right now, why running? When you're running and you are there and you're running there's a little person that talks to you and that little person says "Oh, I'm tired", "My lounge's about to pop", "I'm so hurt", "I'm so tired", "There's no way I can possibly continue". And you wanna quit. Right? That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you're running you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life. Running. Oh right? That's the first key to life. Reading. The reason the reading is so important. There've been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you can have with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything, there's no problem you can have that someone hasn't already solved and wrote about it in a book. So they keys to life are running and reading.

I don't understand this irony - valuable things like cars, gold, diamond are made up of hard materials but most valuable things like money, contracts and books are made up of soft paper.

I wish to continue reading.

But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.

If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don’t have to say anything. Be friendly and then go doyour best. That will make you special, too!

Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

If you can feed in the presence of your enemies, if you can be blessed under the weight of burdens, when you praise God in pain, it is preparation for provision.

Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.

The promised notification was hanging over her head. The postman's knock within the neighbourhood was beginning to bring its daily terrors -and if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.

You know the people," said Pamela, "who say, 'Of course I love reading, but I've no time, alas!' as if everyone who loves reading doesn't make time.

But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read

Be anxious for no thing, be concerned about the state of your soul and that of your children, be concerned about God's work in the world; these are genuine concern but when it comes to the things in your life.....be not anxious. If God is for us who can be against us?