Reading Quotes - Page 32

M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: "He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people's books, and all that remained was dryness. One day I asked him how he came to know so much. He said, 'Not by being such a handsome young man as you. I wasn't in demand, and instead of going out I studied and learned'.

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

I realized that I read books not because of the words used but because of the familiar feelings these words help me express.

Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.

In politics no permanent friends, no permanent enemies but permanent interest.

I am so glad that God's disappointment in me is not greater than his love and I still have a Destiny. I am growing in grace and mercy because that is the only soil that can produce the kind of life that God desires.

With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history

Some books are so special that you never forget where you were the first time you read them.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

For (Levi) Grossman, no books feel more like home than C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which provide the template for what he likes to read—and how he wants to write.

A library — a place full of books! Imagine!" Ivy couldn't imagine a place closer to heaven. Think of all the books you could read!

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

Don't call yourself discouraged anymoreit's no longer your name.

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.

Are you the fruit of redemption? If yes, then make a delightful noise unto Him.

I think part of why I have so many books around me and why I read every day is because I mythologize the writer. I don’t do that with any other artists.

Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

Books are just old friends waiting to be discovered.

There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Reading as an adult, for pleasure, is infinitely better than reading the stuff assigned to you back in school. You get to choose what you want to read.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.

I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I'm trying to give a little of it back to others. It's one of the greatest pleasures I know.

You don't have to position yourself in front of people to be used by God. You don't have to convince anyone that you are good enough for the voice of God, just be grateful that God chooses who He wills and once He is ready to use you, no devil in hell can stop Him.

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

When you discover the joy of reading, your mind opens to a world of wondrous discoveries and infinite possibilities.

Maslow said sex is the primary need. Does that mean pornstars spend more money in books than anyone else?

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.

Nothing great was ever achieved without a personal sacrifice. You have to pay the price to realize your goals.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

Read mark learn and inwardly digest.

Love is quite like reading, I expect. Once you know how, you can't ever imagine not doing it.

Sometimes what not to do is more important than what to do. Sometimes when you are in crisis, when frustration are high or when you are under pressure, what you don't do is more important than what you do. Don't be afraid. ....

Take my books away, and I should be desperate!

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.