Quotes About Reading

The only way to measure our progress is to read about what this country used to be.

Indeed, it occasionally seems as if the book has attempted to inoculate itself against the prospect of actually being read.

I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

La neurosis es un mal menor: no en relación con la salud sino en relación con ese imposible del que hablaba Bataille (La neurosis es la miedosa aprehensión de un fondo imposible, etc.); pero ese mal menor es el único que permite escribir (y leer).

Po mome ukusu, ništa nije indiskretnije od posmatranja nekog dok piše: još je indiskretnije videti nekog da ?ita jedva primetno mi?u?i usnama. Markizu de Sadu je nedostajao taj prizor (za njega isuviše blag): uhvatiti eksplozije na usnama onog koji poluglasno ?ita neki tekst u procesu artikulisanja. Ništa od te minule erotike više nije mogu?e: danas su pisanje i ?itanje skrovite prakse.

flipped backward from the appendix and started looking

I was in a booth, at a window, reading somebody's abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a president I didn't vote for last time and wasn't going to vote for this time.

I like paper better than video.

and one of those interpretive historical markers your aunt reads aloud while nobody listens

Starting kids reading before they're ready can actually boomerang and turn them off to reading

Most people, if you give them a book, they sniff around on it awhile, then try to eat it.

They should have a store next to the bookstore called the shit store where you can get shit books to read while on the shitter. No one reads great literature on the shitter.

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter. It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was -- years old when I happened on a novel called --, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as --.

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain.

It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours. from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion.

A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer's eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

Americans...publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.