Reading Quotes - Page 38

The greatest prison in the universe is an ignorant mind.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.

The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell.

When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)

Books may be irrelevant until it's relevance, importance and purpose is discovered through reading

I could spend all day lost in someone else's imagination. I love reading.

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

The treasures in my house are books.

When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

If you think of religion as something that offers a picture of something more grand than us, reading does the same thing. Reading enables us to lift ourselves from our current situation to something higher – and better. It expands one’s own imagination.

Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.

This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.

Christians believe in a big God but do small things and this is a big insult to God.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it. - Sidelines

Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

The best moments in reading are when you come across your own suppressed emptiness. You stand face to face with a character in your book, a person you never met, someone even who is long dead…And you finally realize that the book is not what you’ve been reading.

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

One great book can change the perspective and understanding of a whole nation

School does not make people, it is learning that makes people great, that is why you see first class students fail and poor. The world is not ruled by those who went to school, it is ruled by those who learn everyday.

How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”“Spoken like one who has never known the ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand.

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Freedom comes from focus, focus brings freedom. Focus on fear you will always be in prison, focus on faith and is nothing the world can keep you knocked down.

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.

Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Offence is an event, offended is a decision. Offence and offended we have to live through it but to stay offended? To live in that place denies the very nature of the salvation that you claimed to have received.

She reads a lot of books. Good things, books.

I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.

That you are a born again Christian does not mean you will automatically succeed except you follow God's principles. Never forget faith without good work is dead.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

The pages of a book are given life only as they are opened

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about

I was behind, but now I'm below. Hopefully, they'll have books wherever I go...

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.

Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives.

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.

My next option is to only write a list of the books I like, but then again, I don’t read a book I don’t like so it doesn’t solve any of my problems.

The look you get when you’re reading in your van, and your feet are up and you sit so still, and your face is alight, and I don’t know where you are; you could be anywhere, so far away, off in a part of your mind I’ll never get to . . . It drives me crazy. The way you just came here, just got up, changed your entire life . . . I mean, my family’s been here for four generations. It would never have occurred to me to do what you did, just to start over and do something different. Amazing.

God sends the best to those who deserves it.