Quotes About Reading

My four years of high school were spent locked up inside "el campo." I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies

Books are good.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

The First Book Open it. Go ahead, it won't bite. Well. . . maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world-- just the world as you think you know it.

Even if we are all products of the cultural blender, each mixture of influences, vocabularies, memories, orientations, and temperament possesses a distinct and unmistakable flavor. We make ourselves out of the models we encounter; we give ourselves a form through the different ways we inhabit other forms. And we bring these differences to the event of reading, even as we are reoriented— sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly— by the sum of what we read.

We gain knowledge by going through life, education, reading and other learning techniques. And with this knowledge we are now able to imagine.

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books.

I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.

Remind me to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers.

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Public education's commendable aim of creating "equal opportunity for all" is too easily subverted by the egregious aim of creating a clean conscience for the few. If everybody can "read at grade level," then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard, get to read pink slips. All we need hope is that the latter sort never get to read Marx.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.

Yeah. Floyd is his batman." His what?" Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant." You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.

Petit à petit, j'ai la impression que le goût de la lecture prend de plus en plus de place. Il me permet de me trouver seul avec une histoire, dans un coin du parc o sur mon lit. Ce que j'aime par-dessus tout, c'est cette possibilité que j'ai de m'arrêter, de revenir en arrière et de relire autant de fois que j'ai le désire.

Sometimes, when I am reading, the way a person has phrased his truth is as important to me as the truth itself.