Reading Quotes - Page 6

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

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

Pat Conroy

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?

Zadie Smith

When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.

Étienne Gilson

Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)

Horace

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

Guy Kawasaki

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

Roberto Bolaño

I will only start taking book reviews seriously from the day that books are able to review readers.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.

Anthony Lane

I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong. The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them.

W Somerset Maugham

Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized . . .

Carew Papritz

After all, that's why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people's lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours.

Michelle Moran

Hello, my name is Jaako and I am an addict. I am addicted to reading.

Jaako J. Wallenius

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

John Barth

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

Shirley Jackson

When I later discovered that she (illustrator Faith Jaques) was a compulsive reader who loved to be alone and kept cats because they are the only pets that allow you to be both, my adoration of Jaques and her work could only increase.

Lucy Mangan

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

Phyllis Rose

The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real

Heather James

It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to be reading that afternoon: a story where, no matter how bad things got, you knew everything was going to turn out fine in the end.

Heather James

A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

Graham Greene

If you think that I am mad now, then take away my books, and you'll find I've completely gone insane!

Jen Selinsky

You read, move your lips, figure out the words, and it's like you're in two places at the same time: you're sitting or lying with your legs curled up, your hand groping in the bowl, but you can see different worlds, far-off worlds that maybe never existed but still seem real. You run or sail or race in a sleigh--you're running away from someone, or you yourself have decided to attack--your heart thumps, life flies by, and it's wondrous: you can live as many different lives as there are books to read.

Tatyana Tolstaya

When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!

Avijeet Das

Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on his skull died slowly away into the black cavern where Faber waited for the echoes to subside. And then when the startled dust had settled down about Montag's mind, Faber began, softly, "All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decisions as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.

Ray Bradbury

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?

Brandon Mull

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

C.S. Lewis

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

John Adams

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

In the real world, the tests are all open book.

Jeff Jarvis

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

Thomas Swick

Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

Richard Brookhiser

The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Eugene H. Peterson

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, ... I was there on the page

Jenny Moss

One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against.

Joshua Rothman

She trailed her fingers along the book spines as she wandered around the room. “My father thinks reading is a waste of time.” Hunter thought her father was a waste of space.

Larissa Ione

Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.

Jessica E. Larsen

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

Chila Woychik

Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.

Jonathan Heatt

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Glen Hirshberg

As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn't always know what it is.

Carla H. Krueger

Reading/writing is a chance to live a different life in a different world.

Tarang Sinha

A man can never have too many books. Neither can he have too many fountain pens, hats, fishing rods, waistcoats, tea caddies, paintings or whatever helps him to feel at home in his surroundings and communicate his personality to the world.

Fennel Hudson

Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.

David Halberstam

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Aldous Huxley

Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels.

Clementine Holzinger

Reading to me has always been like having a conversation with people who wouldn’t ask me any personal questions. Instead, they open up their own hearts and tell their secrets to me.

Marina Simcoe

Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.

Harley King

The best moments in reading are when you come across your own suppressed emptiness. You stand face to face with a character in your book, a person you never met, someone even who is long dead…And you finally realize that the book is not what you’ve been reading.

Hillary Wen

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

Glen Duncan

Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back.

Ben Abix

I love books. I love that moment when you can open one and sink into it. You can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting than yours will ever be.

Elizabeth Scott

A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task !

Syed Arshad

If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

Bill Hybels

... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

John Green

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

Geoff Ryman

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Doris Lessing

Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its necessities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because sometimes it’s all too much, and we don’t have the resilience we need to survive it. When we’re six, we make best friends easily. When we’re fifty, we don’t. That’s age and experience for you.But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we’re still young and open. Even so, it’s not as simple. Because we’re not as simple.(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post)

Michelle Sagara

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Reading Quotes - Page 6

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