Reading Quotes - Page 62

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ...

Reading leads to knowledge and wise ways of living.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

God always wants us to see things from heaven's prospective. You may not be doing much to your community but what you are is so important. You are significant.

It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.

Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.

There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.

In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.

She just wanted - had always wanted - a good book to read. Being chased by hellhounds and blowing things up were comparatively unimportant parts of the job. Getting the books - now, that was what *really* mattered to her.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!

The stories I read, strengthen my spirit in any situation.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Greatest companion is found in reading great books.

We spend great sum of money to buy good books, so that we can satisfy our pleasure of reading.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.

I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on appreciation causes you to linger.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

And then I keep reading, anyway—but not just because I like the story. I like knowing that I'm touching her with my words. That they're crawling in her ears as she sleeps.

They were probably reading on their tablets,” said Nina loyally. She loved her e-reader, too. “Yes, I know,” said the man. “But I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see what they were reading or ask them if it was good, or make a mental note to look for it later. It was as if suddenly, one day, all the books simply disappeared.

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them

Read good books to improve yourself.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture…

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its neces­sities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because some­times it’s all too much, and we don’t have the resilience we need to survive it. When we’re six, we make best friends easily. When we’re fifty, we don’t. That’s age and expe­rience for you.But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we’re still young and open. Even so, it’s not as simple. Because we’re not as simple.(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post)

Women are like locked diaries that men expect to read like open books.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

We are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night. That is how it ends.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

A castle of defense, a bastion of mightA fort where the wise teach the young to fightAn armory of weapons, sharp as hooksAre wrapped in leather and shelved as books

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

When this book is mould,And a book of manyWaiting to be soldFor a casual penny,In a little open case,In a street unclean and cluttered,Where a heavy mud is spatteredFrom the passing drays,Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters, findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

The paper is my savior, the pen my blood, to words that shed my world.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture.

I can't think of too many things as exciting as reading a book for the first time!

On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind." I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared. If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand. That's why I love books.

Reading can only take you so far, up to the moment where you must take action with your own hands

The family that reads together grows together!

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.

Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.

Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey...

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.