Reading Quotes - Page 31

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working m

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.

Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.

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.

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.

Once I finished reading a good book, it gives me a hard time coping up with reality.

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

..no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.

Oh for a book and a shady nook,Either indoors or out,with the green leaves whispering overhead,or the street cries all about.Where I may read at all my easeboth of the new and old,For a jolly good book whereon to lookis better to me than gold

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books....The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

[A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

Don't run around looking for someone who can sexually satisfy you, run around and look for the book which will intellectually satisfy you.

Happiness is a state of mental,physical and spiritual well-being. Think pleasantly,engaged sport and read daily to enhance your well-being.

There were tough thoughts battling one another inside his head for the right to become reality.

The Bible is a book that every Christian should read, listen to, or have read to him or her throughout his or her lifetime; however, in the event that God has gifted a person with the characteristic for the utter joy that envelopes some during times of, what they would describe as, “pleasure reading” (an often times rare characteristic), it is only acceptable that he or she (particularly) reads His Holy Word at least once during his or her lifetime. At least, that’s what I think.

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

Just as an apple a day keeps the doctor away,a book a week keeps the mind ever sleek

I smiled. “You mean like a psychic imprint? I know your assistant director of the Preternatural Division, and I mean no disrespect, but I never got the feeling you believed in magic as an investigative tool.'From the book 9 Incarnate - Caitlin Diggs Series

Growing up in the digital age, I'm expected to embrace all forms of modern technology with blissful ignorance. Books were always one of few escapes from this, because reading a book means not having to look at another damned glowing screen - which is why, no matter how "convenient" or "enhanced" digital enthusiasts claim that Ebooks are, I'll never see them as real books. They're just files of binary data, and while they might be considered books by a large amount of people, Ebooks have lost the human quality that real books have. You can argue that this is pretentious or stupid or nostalgic, but ultimately what will you pass down to your children and grandchildren? A broken old Kindle device with the same files that millions of other people have, or the dog-eared paperbacks that you fell in love with and wrote your name in and got signed by the author and flipped through in the bookstore and kept with you for years, like an old friend?

This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.

The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

A great book is one, which really don’t finish when it finishes.

Books make the soul float.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

I will gladly accept any and all books, however. A person can never have too much reading material. Especially on a fall or winter evening. If you’re feeling extra generous, you may include tea. I love a unique blend.

For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor... To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.

My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.

There is no gift of principles, you must apply them if you want to move forward.

...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.