Reading Quotes - Page 46

Time machines, magic portals, transporters, worm holes, flying carpets, relocation charms—such things do exist. They're called books.

When you read without an open mind, you're already filtering ideas and intended message. Selective reading contributes to wilful ignorance.

This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role).

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...

In the words of Agatha Swanburne, founder of Swanburne Academy, "Every book is judged by its cover until it is read.

To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.

Man is like a bride unto God. God is jealous when man veers away from Him.

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.

Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience.

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

If You have a good reading habit, then you become a good thinker

Reading is solitude.

Literature gives great light and great life.

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

I have my priorities and I know my purpose. I do not Praise God because of my pain but I praise Him because of what the pain is producing.

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.

The world exists to end up in a book.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. 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.

A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof . . . that literature—that narrative art in whatever form—will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories—human stories, stories that speak to us—in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that.

We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please...We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.

At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy.

Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Books are best preserved in the minds of readers.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

The more desperate the situation, the more opportunity for miracle. If you need something from God, you need to be at the right place, the right position and at the right time

Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.

I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.

It may be escapist, but if I have a choice between watching the news or reading a book which gets me to see the world through different eyes, I will always choose the latter!

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The only thing more interesting than the truth is fiction dressed up as the truth.

To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance.

The deepness of your mind produces the thickness of your thoughts.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.

Always and Everywhere a Book Is Waiting for Me

I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.

I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong. The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them.

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.

It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little.

In God’s Kingdom there are no overnight sensations or flash-in-the-pan successes.Anyone who wants to be used of God will experience hidden years in the backside of the desert. During that time the Lord is polishing, sharpening and preparing us to fit into His bow, so at the right time, like “a polished shaft” He can launch us into fruitful service. The invisible years are years of serving, studying, being faithful in another person’s ministry and doing the behind-the-scenes work. The Bible says, ‘God is not unjust; he will not forget your work’ (Hebrews 6:10 NIV 2011 Edition). Be patient; when the time is right He will bring forth the fruit He placed inside you.

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

This is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

For those of you who are begging God for a breakthrough, this is not the way of getting something from your heavenly father, you don't have to beg him for what He already bought for you, you don't have to beg Him for what He died to give you. You don't have to convince people, you don't have to convince anybody if God likes to do a work in your life, it is done.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.

(She) could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching up the makeshift constructs.

Paying the high cost of education is better than paying the high price of ignorance.

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!