Reading Quotes - Page 63

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.

Whenever you are in transition it is always important to choose the words that you use. You call it crises in your life and I call it transition.

You’ve got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem.

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family—the first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Reading is an escape people use in order to get away from reality. It is a chance to be free and explore who you are.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Manufactured spirit is much more reliable than organic spirit.

A good book is an event in my life.

If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.

Ever since I could read, I’ve wanted to write a book. I never thought I had anything to write about. Maybe you don’t think this is worth writing about. But this book isn’t for you. It’s for me.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

We are so much distracted nowadays. There is so much distractions in the world today call it internet, media, football matches etc. but don't let it consume you.

The presence of God is so important in the life of believers. There is abundance of all you need to make your life comfortable in His presence.

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.

They take their drama firsthand, in the real world, while I prefer the drama of fictional characters–in worlds where things happen for a reason, where questions are answered, where conflicts are always resolved.

This is a woman who didn’t want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that’s bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other’s thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.]

Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

I live in paradise within the pages of a book.

Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.

From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.

How you feel after reading something indicates not what you’ve read but where you are at.

A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.

What you need to succeed is already there, just lean on God. For your faith's sake, God can still disappoint the devil.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

If God give you a status, don't turn yourself to a statue. Don't become a monument. God still want to reside inside you but not in a monument.

For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

Be warned, reader. Once seen, something cannot be unseen and once read, something cannot be unread. What lies ahead can be the future of spirit but the future of spirit can also be what lies inside your head.

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

I like two types of dust: pixie dust and dust from old, first edition books.

Reading leads to knowing more. Knowing more leads to arrogance. Reading further leads to humbleness.

Reading that pleases and profits, that together delights and instructs, has all that one should desire.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

I am a bit old fashion but I believe in prayer, I believe prayer can move mountain. Prayer might not be our responsibility but it is a good starting place. It can give us heaven's prospectives on human problems. I know we need to do a bit more than pray but that doesn't mean we don't need to pray.

You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.

Dear Lord I am tired of forgiving people that offended me. Is there anyway you can fix this people's mind to do the right thing? Dear Lord I am tired of loving those that hate me, can you please replace their hateful heart with a lovng spirit. Dear Lord I am tired of hearing people complaining about the world not being peaceful, no money, so much wars and no love. Can you please open their eyes to see that there will be no peace for a wicked man. Remind them that you promised to supply all their needs and that with you all things are possible but it is possible to only those that believe just as I believe that only you can fix any hurting soul and situations.

Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.