Quotes About Reading

I laugh because I dare not cry. This is a crazy world and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke. That doesn't mean I don't read and can't think. I read everything from Giblett to Hoyle, from Sartre to Pauling. I read in the tub, I read on the john, I read in bed, I read when I eat alone, and I would read in my sleep if I could keep my eyes open.

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.

It is a well-known idea, not just among mystics, but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers?

READING NEWS HEADLINES CAUSES BRAIN TO SHRINK: SCIENTISTS FIND HAIKU ALSO RISKY

Susan had decided to sit by the pool at the hotel with a copy of a book by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child.

You hate people. Because, really, you're afraid of them, aren't you? Always have been, ever since you were a little tyke. Rather snuggle up in a chair under the lamp and read. You did it thirty years ago, and you're still doing it now. Hiding away under the covers of a book.

The light shone down on his plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair as he bent his head to resume reading.

It was really a fascinating book—no wonder he hadn't noticed how fast the time had passed.

Non dubito, quip titulus libri nostri raritate suâ quamplurimos alliciat ad legendum: inter quos nonnulli obliquæ opinionis, mente languidi, multi etiam maligni, et in ingenium nostrum ingrati accedent, qui temerariâ suâ ignorantiâ

I would advise him that is actually melancholy not to read this tract of Symptoms, lest he disquiet or make himself for a time worse, and more melancholy than he was before.

Kerri turned each page slowly, lifting the next page and scanning the pictures

Like serious reading itself, real travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.22

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.

Read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit.

What the Boy chiefly dabbled in was natural history and fairy tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.

Daily Bible reading has always been a deep help for daily spiritual growth. But millions of Christians got bogged down and give up by the time they read Leviticus! However, reading 15 minutes a day from The One Year Bible gives you the entire Bible in a year of daily variety, interest, and growth in God.

You can't eat [literature], that's the problem, he said. I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.

And that's maybe a better description of the experience of reading the Federalist Papers now, if you're reading them for guidance through a modern crisis. The predictions of the Framers of the Constitution were accurate for a time, but history diverged from their path a while back.

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man.

Can I ask what you're reading?...She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. Have you read it? She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. It's a sad story. Sad stories make good books, She said. They do.

have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.