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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
4dc7e34 Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map. reading explore Stephen King
ec0110d ? ????? ??? ? ??? ???? ???? ???? ???????? ???. reading inspirational ???? ???? ????
d273694 This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read. reading Maxine Hong Kingston
6c3c67f Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. literature reading comfort home Jeanette Winterson
4065dda 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. words literature reading Julian Barnes
dfe8e9e I have never been able to resist a book about books. reading books Anne Fadiman
b5a91bc The book thief has struck for the first time - the beginning of an illustrious career. reading Markus Zusak
5fbfc0f Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. words literature reading Arthur Schopenhauer
8dd7332 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. reading writing society norms politeness Stephen King
9dc1760 "Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life. libraries reading life Isaac Asimov
6ac1386 Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real. reading Rodman Philbrick
039008b What I learned on my own I still remember reading discovery learning education intelligence schooling thinking thought Nassim Nicholas Taleb
d756917 She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself. reading princess Frances Hodgson Burnett
a3cc223 She had her addictions and one of them was reading. reading Jeannette Walls
e57a47c What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. words literature reading E. M. Forster
8254a52 "Reading is important. libraries reading newbery-medal-acceptance-speech Neil Gaiman
8b7fe71 No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books. reading Julia Quinn
71a69b2 The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. 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. words library literature reading freedom Virginia Woolf
7d23552 She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain reading Louisa May Alcott
5e32593 Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth. reading immortality books rebirth reader Alberto Manguel
c59f917 Books didn't make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books. reading books inspirational teens Jackson Pearce
d246386 Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing a book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right--in the way that's best for us. story reading writing god life nesbit railway christian mistakes E. Nesbit
1422d54 "Jane's stories are too sensible. Then Diana puts too much murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them." -Anne Shirley" reading writing friends humor L.M. Montgomery
e5a4be5 Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. story reading books stories Anne Fadiman
052ba41 Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she'd dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they'd lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings--as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you'd never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself. reading stories Cornelia Funke
1ca2409 Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world. reading maester-aemon samwell-tarly George R.R. Martin
f2d8c81 Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. reading writing philosophy digression wit Ray Bradbury
be2612e Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself. reading women teaching Virginia Woolf
0a482c6 Temeraire said, 'It is very nice how many books there are, indeed. And on so many subjects! reading temeraire Naomi Novik
7d09497 I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. reading classics Charles Bukowski
633f9f6 There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything. words literature reading Richard Flanagan
418ee9a I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. reading chilldhood read child Alberto Manguel
77552c1 Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. reading home Italo Calvino
2cee4a6 From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. solitude words literature reading lonliness Betty Smith
ac95af4 To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative -- the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. escape reading fiction interpretation real-world narrative escapism storytelling Umberto Eco
e0966cc For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. reading writing Virginia Woolf
3f3d576 Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. words literature reading Virginia Woolf
c16a08e ..holding a book but reading the empty spaces. reading something-wicked-this-way-comes Ray Bradbury
b7120e2 There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. mind reading Stephen R. Covey
0550d9f I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure. reading print-books Susan Hill
8dc1ae5 I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. reading tsundoku Alberto Manguel
4b9ca13 If I couldn't sleep, I could read. sleep reading Gail Carson Levine
078d646 Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain -- the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed -- then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood. words literature reading Vladimir Nabokov
04666fc A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity. reading necessities treasures spiritual-life purpose-of-life Penelope Fitzgerald
36319c5 The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. reading novel Ursula K. Le Guin
9a20cac Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two. reading Ray Bradbury
3c77113 Weren't all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other! reading Cornelia Funke
07852bf The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper. libraries reading summer Polly Horvath
7184d37 Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. reading preconceptions open-mindedness expectations Virginia Woolf
bbd9de0 I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. words literature reading healing hurt language Jeanette Winterson
a5c0eb4 Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. reading happiness life self-sufficiency Saul Bellow
0ea6c37 The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. in moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm. slavery reading frederick-douglass Frederick Douglass
b6abd14 "How can you read and talk at the same time?" I asked. "Well, I usually can't, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging." reading talking John Green
a309790 Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books. solitude heaven reading Jean Rhys
359a1b3 I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places. reading Terry Pratchett
268557a Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. words literature reading Anne Michaels
bcbd232 That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox. reading life love everyday-life write movies thinking Nicole Krauss
371cad6 Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own. reading schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer
93181af We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. words literature reading language Vladimir Nabokov
039566d My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. reading letters Mary Shelley
89be3f5 She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die. reading Annie Dillard
a792d51 if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading. reading writing Paulo Coelho
6cec52d Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? reading danger Jeanette Winterson
aae5499 But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. reading Julie Powell
331ffaa The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass. library reading feelings books smell mood read experience Betty Smith
04391b2 Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. reading writing A.S. Byatt
4f7141c "In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!" -- marriage reading Nick Hornby
b3d71ab Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover. reading Erica Jong
cfaeaf1 When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it. reading William Goldman
75a2735 My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. reading books read Alberto Manguel
22355ac I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow words literature reading poetry Billy Collins
65fe099 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. words literature reading Diane Setterfield
f2bc7df I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. reading sensational Oscar Wilde
7aa89ab I know because I read. Might I suggest you try it? reading Libba Bray
3f0c2fe 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. reading books society reader Alberto Manguel
8c95c3e To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself. reading collecting Julian Barnes
77ae66b Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it. reading motivational life Robert Greene
474864a "Now, 75 years [after ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. reading vacuity modern-life superficiality critical-thinking computers communication Harper Lee
afab4ba But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality. escape reading flawed relatable Cecelia Ahern
9282eb3 "I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext." reading object-of-reading rereading book-reading Italo Calvino
aa6efda And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. reading Nick Hornby
b03298f When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it. literature reading Nicole Krauss
48d25b8 76. David Hume - Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile - or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell - Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - Traite Elementaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison - Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham - Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier - Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth - Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz - On War 93. Stendhal - The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron - Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer - Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday - Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte - The Positive Philosophy 99. Honore de Balzac - Pere Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill - A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens - Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard - Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx - Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot - Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen - Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James - The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James - The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincare - Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw - Plays and Prefaces reading Mortimer J. Adler
3de0c20 It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. words literature reading nature Annie Dillard
d3d7db6 Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there. library reading books Nassim Nicholas Taleb
30ea96b hnk ktb .. Glfh 'fDl m fyh reading Charles Dickens
ef8977b Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. words literature history reading Hermann Hesse
51efa3c Life happened because I turned the pages. words literature reading Alberto Manguel
359c36a Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. words literature reading Jeanette Winterson
859696d Un libro leido a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta. spanish reading books love leer libro libros book español lectura David Mitchell
a337aa3 The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. words literature reading Rebecca Solnit
eb270b0 For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands. words literature reading Stefan Zweig
1ec9e17 I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile. reading christopher-paolini eragon Christopher Paolini
30dd074 "Oh for a book and a shady nook, Either indoors or out, with the green leaves whispering overhead, or the street cries all about. Where I may read at all my ease both of the new and old, reading John Wilson
7c45132 The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture--exploit the new thing then move on. There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are. literature reading freedom imagination wildness connection human-nature Jeanette Winterson
0c0c763 I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty... reading death old-age aging Edward Gorey
7c101e7 I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. words literature reading poetry healing language trauma Jeanette Winterson
47988cf The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know -- the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be.... The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. words literature reading Thomas Wolfe
60df531 To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature. looks reading writing handsomeness face gift talent William Shakespeare
01ee0a4 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 literature reading James Salter
ba8e3c9 There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous. reading Anaïs Nin
b51facd "Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end ... that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. libraries reading Neil Gaiman
adbc400 I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. reading treasure Virginia Woolf
cf1a601 I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page reading Laurie Halse Anderson
6b8cf94 The more you read, the more you calm down. reading Robert M. Pirsig
18a9771 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. reading inspiration innocencevation self-improvement ideas Steven Johnson
7a455ff She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him. reading entrancement elopement charles-dickens Eudora Welty
ba8f8e3 Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. words literature reading A.S. Byatt
4154763 Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you words literature reading Diane Setterfield
50b9256 The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. words literature reading Ray Bradbury
e971579 Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading. reading Virginia Woolf
9761f0c Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. humour reading truths Frances Hodgson Burnett
d04a3c9 Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story. reading Italo Calvino
85c543f You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading. thoughts reading nothingness James Patterson
c4b1d85 I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. television reading writing pride thought Stephen King
a9bf44f I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900. reading Nick Hornby
2cc847e A library could show you everything if you knew where to look. library reading Pat Conroy
0606f50 As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. reading dictators illiteracy Alberto Manguel
3281d2f Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book. reading quidditch J.K. Rowling
070fa4f Reading the very best writers--let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy--is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight. reading poetry oscar-wilde Harold Bloom
4557b5c "More books." His eyes went wide. "You have, like, then books you just said you haven't read." "Doesn't mean I won't get more books." I smiled at is incredulous expression. "I haven't been able to read a lot lately, but I will, and then I won't be out of anything new to read." reading deamon-black onyx lux-series katy-swartz opal Jennifer L. Armentrout
79313b3 "Are you missing the library again?" Seth asked, startling her as he walked into the room. Kendra turned to face her brother. "You caught me," she congratulated him. "I'm reading." "I bet the librarians back home are panicking. Summer vacation, and no Kendra Sorenson to keep them in business. Have they been sending you letters?" "Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment." Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?" "I bet you'll tell me." " 'If you're reading this, you are one.' " You're a riot." Kendra turned back to the journal, flipping to a random page. Seth took a seat on his bed across from her. "Kendra, seriously, I can sort of see reading a cool book for fun, but dusty old journals? Really? Has anybody told you there are magical creatures out there?" He pointed out the window. "Has anybody told you some of those creatures can eat you?" Kendra responded. "I'm not reading these just for fun. They have good info." "like what? Patton and Lena smooching?" Kendra rolled her eyes. "I'm not telling. You'll end up in a tar pit." "There's a tar pit?" he said, perking up. "Where?" library reading nerd curiosity Brandon Mull
598f3a0 In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others. literature reading Milan Kundera
bc053a4 Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive- my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. self-knowledge integrity reading social-change isolation Jonathan Franzen
1a67f83 The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal. photography reading John Dunning
03aeab5 A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound. words literature reading Richard Flanagan
a6f8360 I myself grew up to be not only a Hero, but also a Writer. When I was an adult, I rewrote , and I included not only some descriptions of the various deadly dragon species, and a useful Dragonese Dictionary, but also this story of how the book came to be written in the first place. This is the book that you are holding in your hands right now. Perhaps you even borrowed it from a Library? If so, thank Thor that the sinister figure of the Hairy Scary Librarian is not lurking around a corner, hiding in the shadows, Heart-Slicers at the ready, or that the punishment for your curiosity is not the whirring whine of a Driller Dragon's drill. You, dear reader, I am sure cannot what it might to be like to live in a world in which books are banned. For surely such things will never happen in the Future? Thank Thor that you live in a time and a place where people have the right to live and think and write and read their books in peace, and there are no need for Heroes anymore ... And spare a thought for those who have not been so lucky. reading writing books Cressida Cowell
84d064b Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. reading books readers Alberto Manguel
168ef41 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. words literature reading Elizabeth von Arnim
24f7c2e A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone. reading inspirational composer Haruki Murakami
04d4983 Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out, like the rain. (p. 85) reading love-for-words the-book-thief Markus Zusak
9f51708 This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. literature reading intelligence brain-power mental-power simplemindedness P.G. Wodehouse
0f46e89 "October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content." seasons reading satisfaction happiness ending-a-chapter turning-a-page fairy-tale happy-ending season october book garden tale Neil Gaiman
94f830b Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com. individuality reading society Douglas Coupland
c0dbda8 Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. history reading historical-fiction Louis L'Amour
cdd9695 Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. reading books titles Alberto Manguel
3161cb9 But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked. reading Betty Smith
803c521 He said it was the kind of book you made your own. reading stephen-chbosky the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower Stephen Chbosky
bc2ae96 There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life. reading christopher-paolini eragon Christopher Paolini
3b3a6a9 ..reading a book doesn't mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination. reading books occupy how-to occupy-wall-street book Noam Chomsky
c3269e5 Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini. reading parenting gifts Nick Hornby
99834bb Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. reading humor love-of-reading culture sports Nick Hornby
fcc9e61 He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends. reading books love-of-reading love-of-books reader book-quotes Victor Hugo
565d128 Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. reading slow-reading Susan Hill
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