Reading Quotes - Page 50

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

over the decadesher books becamesuch a part of herthatthe ink somehow escapedher veins & bloomedher favorite words & imagesonto her skin.nowthe worldwould have no doubt:she was thepageboundgirl- page to skin

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

[…] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.

I am the most important person to me. I am the most important person in the entire universe to me. I am the centre of my own universe.

A dictionary should be descriptive not prescriptive.

One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against.

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.

Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of li

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified.They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along.

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

The sisterhood of librarians is a non-profit organisation and our goal is to keep imagination alive, not make money.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

as you know that prior to Search Enggine (google, yahoo, bing etc) our knowledge comes from books. and we often underestimate the cover of the book before reading it. where the universe and everything in it were all neatly recorded in the book .. but unfortunately, lately reduced book reader interest. and tonight I say that the inspiration of the book far more powerful than anything .. not even a lot of writers who took also into his imagination. yes, I started to read

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.

The notions of a young man of one or two and twenty,' said he, 'as to what is necessary in manners to make him quite the thing, are more absurd, I believe, than those of any other set of beings in the world. The folly of the means they often employ is only to be equalled by the folly of what they have in view.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

By reading can make you more clever

You can never have too many books or too many hugs.

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.

If someone doesn't understand the importance of sensitivity readers, chances are they may need them the most...

Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.

And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.

A book a week I heave a sigh;That Slogan's peremptory cryI will not hear, I will not heed.How can They say that I should needThe book They bid me weekly buy?But Slogans change, as days go by;My Psyche listens, fluttering shy,To newer message "Come and ReadA book a week."To read! to read! O wings that flyO'er sun-kissed lands, through clouded skyThat bear us on where Great ones lead!I too must follow, so I pleadFor magic wings. I'll read (or try)A book a week!

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.

But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?""Yes, I am fond of history.""I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome.

As a boy, reading was my religion. It helped me to discover my soul. Later, writing helped me to record its journey.

I will tell everyone I know to come [to the library]. This place saves lives.

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and associations, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.

The ending of a book is, in my experience, both the best and worst part to read. For the ending will often determine whether you love or hate the book.Both emotions lead to disappointment. If the ending was good, and the book was worth your time, then you are left annoyed and depressed because there is no more book to read. However, if the ending was bad, then it's too late to stop reading. You're left annoyed and depressed because you wasted so much time on a book with a bad ending.Therefore, reading is obviously worthless, and you should go spend your time on other, more valuable pursuits.

Books may not judge you, but people do.

How the story will end, no one knows? We can only envisage.

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I would rather have a man chasing JESUS than a house full of stuffs and garrage filled with big cars.

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.

To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decrepit.

My life is a reading list.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted ...but to weigh and consider.

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.

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

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

Books are sacred wisdom.

If you want to see and feel magic first hand, read a book to your kid before bedtime. —Richard Due

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.