Reading Quotes - Page 19

We can do away with ignorance, if we take it upon ourselves to encourage each other to use our intelligence.

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.

Karen Swallow Prior

The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as “bookfaces” or “unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said,” and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.

We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.

Mediation on the Scriptures will renew your mind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

A man who reads will find himself.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Books are my greatest treasures.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.

The greatest treasures are books.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest adventure is reading!

Lailah Gifty Akita

The best gift, you can give me is a book.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Renew your mind daily by reading the Holy Scriptures.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.

She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.

It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

Diane Setterfield

The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

Library science was the foundation of all sciences.

Robert A. Heinlein

The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.

There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold.

Alexandr Iscenco

The treasures in my house are books.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Reading sparks writing.

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

Reading opens up other pockets of the mind.

You can Save Time with Writing but you can Save a Life by Reading.

Maslow said sex is the primary need. Does that mean pornstars spend more money in books than anyone else?

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

John Mole

There is no other enjoyment like reading

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

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.

Marilynne Robinson

Greatest companion is found in reading great books.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I know the mind of ancient souls by reading ancient books.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I can understand now 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 in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.

Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.

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.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.

The better the school library, the higher the reading scores.

Stephen D. Krashen

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

Cats and books are my universe. Both are infinitely fascinating and full of mystery.

Rai Aren

A book was mere paper splattered with ink until a reader’s mind gave it life.

Elizabeth Langston

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

People experience books so very differently.

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.

President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: "The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.

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