Quotes About Reading

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read.

We read to find the end, for the story's sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers, oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, skipping pages. We read contemptuously, admiringly, negligently, angrily, passionately, enviously, longingly.

Geschichten sind unser Gedächtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstätten für dieses Gedächtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedächtnis neu erschaffen können, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung rückübersetzen und so auf dem aufbauen, was frühere Generationen für bewahrenswert hielten.

Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.

I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.

Habla el autor] A los cuatro años descubrí que sabía leer. (...) No aprendí a escribir hasta mucho después, cumplidos los siete años. Quizá pudiese vivir sin escribir. No creo que pudiera vivir sin leer. (...)

Literature is not dogma: it offers questions, not conclusive answers. Libraries are essentially places of intellectual freedom: any constraints imposed upon them are our own. Reading is, or can be, the open-ended means by which we come to know a little more about the world and about ourselves, not through opposition but through recognition of words addressed to us individually, far away, and long ago.

Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

Aprendí pronto que la lectura es acumulativa y que avanza por progresión geométrica; cada lectura nueva se construye sobre lo que el lector ha leído antes.

Pero no sólo los gobiernos totalitarios le temen a la lectura. En los patios de las escuelas y en los vestuarios de los clubes deportivos se intimida a los lectores tanto como en los despachos gubernamentales y en las prisiones.

All reading is interpretation, every reading reveals and is dependent on the circumstances of its reader.

Pero leer en la cama proporciona algo más que entretenimiento; brinda también una peculiar sensación de intimidad. Leer en la cama es un acto egocéntrico, inmóvil, libre de las ordinarias convenciones sociales, invisible para el mundo y que, como tiene lugar entre las sábanas, en el reino de la lascivia y la pereza pecaminosa, comparte algo de la emoción de las cosas prohibidas.

Reading is reclaiming the right to... human immortality, because the memory of writing is all-encompassing and limitless.

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain.

one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … 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.

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.

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.

You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly.

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.

You couldn't have lower-caste people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.

ToÅ£i oamenii care ÅŸtiu s? citeasc? au puterea de a se dep??i pe ei înÅŸiÅŸi, de a multiplica în mod creator modurile lor de existen??, au puterea s? fac? în aÅŸa fel încît viaÅ£a lor s? fie interesant? ÅŸi plin? de semnificaÅ£ie.

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. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.