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205f4ad
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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story
reading
reader
stories
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1c5a9b6
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Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.
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covers
discovery
books
inspirational
adventure
advice
book
readers
reader
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David Almond |
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5e32593
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Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
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reading
immortality
books
rebirth
reader
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Alberto Manguel |
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3f0c2fe
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Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
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reading
books
society
reader
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Alberto Manguel |
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20f87d2
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Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
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censors
readers
reader
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Alberto Manguel |
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fcc9e61
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He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.
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reading
books
love-of-reading
love-of-books
reader
book-quotes
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Victor Hugo |
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c68c000
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Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
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reading
books
reader
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Paul Theroux |
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5afcd95
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I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
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reading
books
learning
being-a-reader
biblioholism
bookishness
reader
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Anthony Powell |
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04ff751
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But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination.
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words
reader
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Jodi Picoult |
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5a19737
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As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
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reading
government
reader
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Alberto Manguel |
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517fc58
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"He reached into the bag and drew out an odd array of manga, ripped paperbacks of books both classic and modern, and a small stack of crumpled magazines. "See, I even brought some things to read aloud. I wasn't sure what you'd like, so there's a bit of everything."
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reader
holly-black
the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown
manga
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Holly Black |
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9105ef7
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Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.
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reading
reader
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Diane Setterfield |
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8280829
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Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
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reading
page
reader
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Alberto Manguel |
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ad6cb60
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There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.
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mackerel
reader
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Anthony Burgess |
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e783b7b
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For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
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time
history
writer
reader
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Peter Ackroyd |
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4854038
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is--a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)--a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
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reading
art
reader
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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04cc68b
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Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
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solitude
library
literature
reading
books
bookish
irvine-welsh
skagboys
zenith
heroine
reading-books
read
introversion
introvert
reader
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Irvine Welsh |
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b640fef
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The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
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writer
writing
reader
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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27d1aab
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"Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too."
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literature
reading
writer
writing
the-writing-life
art
writing-advice
write
artistry
read
discipline
reader
artist
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Annie Dillard |
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fb53d7d
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They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.
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reader
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Paul Auster |
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50b7e68
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"A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them."
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reader-life
reader
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Jonathan Franzen |
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501d71b
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All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.
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writing
reader
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a18de70
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You, Reader I wonder how you are going to feel when you find out that I wrote this instead of you, that it was I who got up early to sit in the itchen and mention with a pen the rain-soaked windows, the ivy wallpaper, and the goldfish circling in its bowl. Go ahead and turn aside, bite your lip and tear out the page, but, listen- it was just a matter of time before one of us happened to notice the unlit candles and the clock humming on the wall. Plus, nothing happened that morning- a song on the radio, a car whistling along the road outside- and I was only thinking about the shakers of salt and pepper that were standing side by side on a place mat. I wondered if they had become friends after all these years or if they were still strangers to one another like you and I who manage to be known and unknown to each other at the same time- me at this table with a bowl of pears, you leaning in a doorway somewhere near some blue hydrageas, reading this.
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poetry
reader
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Billy Collins |