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0e22102
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Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
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literature
reading
reading-life
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Thomas C. Foster |
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8af836f
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Ahora digo --dijo a esta sazon Don Quijote-- que el que lee mucho y anda mucho ve mucho y sabe mucho.
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reading
traveling
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
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f531a0a
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"Didn't you read the owner's manual?" " ? See here, missy. I've been an etheric engineer since before you were born. I think I know how to handle a lift crystal." "Evidently you aren't bright enough to do so, if you cannot read. We provide those manuals and specifications and procedures for a reason, you know."
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manuals
reading
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Jim Butcher |
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653f31f
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I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn't enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started--no longer.
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reading
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Gretchen Rubin |
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ad59051
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Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.
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literature
reading
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Alberto Manguel |
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576d556
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Cosa c'e di meglio, in realta, che starsene la sera accanto al fuoco con un bel libro in mano, mentre il vento sbatte contro le persiane e arde il lume della lampada?
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books
reading
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Gustave Flaubert |
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bb66dce
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Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.
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reading
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Azar Nafisi |
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4291881
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{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed--all I have ever needed--was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.
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reading
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Michael Chabon |
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cfd8cfa
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The fine and varied literature that I read was almost all in translation: from classic works by Jack London, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, to detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, not to mention fascinating pornographic books. I also appreciated the biblical stories that contained all three genres.
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reading
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Shlomo Sand |
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af28fac
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It'll be dark soon, Rudy.' He walked on. 'So what?' 'I'm going back.' Rudy stopped and watched her now as if she were betraying him. 'That's right, book thief. Leave me now. I bet if there was a lousy book at the end of this road, you'd keep walking. Wouldn't you?
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reading
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Markus Zusak |
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cbabddd
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I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book.
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book
books
history-of-love
nicole-krauss
reading
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Nicole Krauss |
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5f02aa6
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I couldn't believe it. It wasn't just that he knew about Narnia. I could tell that he knew what I meant by a Narnia cubby. It was all there in his eyes. He knew that I didn't actually think I was Lucy going through a real door to magical lands. He knew that the cubby in the Roadmaster was a sane person's ticket to freedom of thought.
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reading
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Kathryn Lasky |
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485ede2
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"It was in Durmond that I made the wonderful discovery of interlibrary loan, the greatest invention since the light bulb. [...] All the libraries were linked together, so no matter where I moved, as long as I had a library card I would be part of a web as powerful and beautiful as the one in Charlotte's Web. Just as Charlotte the spider wrote messages in her web that transformed Wilbur the ordinary pig into "some pig," this web would transform me. I would eventually collect nearly fifty different library cards. I was snagged forever in the wonderful web of the public library system."
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libraries
library
reading
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Kathryn Lasky |
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bca19fe
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Reading has not gone out of fashion in the last number of years, nor in the ones while you slept in the asteroid belt. Your relatives do not wish to expose themselves to deep thought, lest they be affected by it.
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critical-thinking
reading
thought
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Anne McCaffrey |
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93f7104
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Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries--Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Cafe Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Cafe Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.
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books
collecting-books
knowledge
love
obsession
reading
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Stefan Zweig |
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fee9f80
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And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
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reading
voice
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Azar Nafisi |
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5b94123
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"Nettie turned her eyes toward me. "Bookworm, are you?" The way she said that word absolutely made my skin crawl. She made me sound like I was some spineless, mindless creature living on mold underground. I do love books, but there is nothing wormy about it. I would much prefer to be called a bat than a worm any day of the week. Just that afternoon at the library storytime, Nancy had read a beautiful poem about a baby bat being born. It described the bats' "sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces." It told how they soared and looped through the night, how they listened by sending out what the poet called "shining needlepoints of sound." Bats live by hearing. I realized, standing in front of Nettie right then, that when I read I am like a bat soaring and swooping through the night, skimming across the treetops to find my way through the densest forest in the darkest night. I listen to the shining needlepoints of sound in every book I read. I am no bookworm. I am the bookbat."
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reading
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Kathryn Lasky |
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054de01
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Es, pues, de saber que este sobredicho hidalgo, los ratos que estaba ocioso, que eran los mas del ano, se daba a leer.
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reading
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
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e502cdc
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He was halfway to the house, thinking to set the cabbage inside the kitchen door,when a brown blur thundered past him. Joanna Robbins tore out of the barn astride a magnificent chestnut quarter horse. She leaned forward in the saddle,hat flopping against her back, hair streaming out behind her in a wild curly mass as she urged her mount to a full-out gallop. Unable to do anything but stare, Crockett stood dumbstruck as she raced past. She was the most amazing horsewoman he'd ever seen. Joanna Robbins. The shy creature who claimed painting and reading were her favorite pastimes had just bolted across the yard like a seasoned jockey atop Thoroughbred. She might have inherited her mother's grace and manners, but the woman rode like her outlaw father.Maybe better.
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horseback-riding
joanna-robbins
jockey
painting
reading
shy-people
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Karen Witemeyer |
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249074c
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"My interest in reading novels of various fiction was roused at a very early age. And the thought-provoking storylines of the great Donald Goines had been included in my very first library collection. ("Reviews by Cat Ellington: The Complete Anthology, Vol. 1," 2018)"
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cat-ellington
donald-goines
quotes
reading
reading-books
reviews-by-cat-ellington
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Cat Ellington |
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7e72c63
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The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.
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maturation
reading
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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eac4a31
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I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed until the reader fell into it and skittered right to the end without stopping. The relief of being in someone else's hands. Yes, exactly: I needed to be under a spell....it didn't matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I'm sure it didn't matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later--I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or in this case, guardians of my peace. They were the authors of this opportunity--diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I'd found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn't disturb me until closing time.
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peace
reading
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Marilyn Johnson |
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e357922
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I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
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reading
teaching
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Azar Nafisi |