Quotes About Reading

You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it [the drug] had a most remarkable effect — even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment." I asked for particulars of this uncharacteristic conduct. "She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation.

Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.

More than anything he wanted to read, because only in a book could he escape from his own dark thoughts.

I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.

A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

When she was reading, she didn't just leave her own life behind, she stepped into someone else's.

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

Elizabeth Brown prefered a book to going on a date. While friends went out and danced 'till dawn, she stayed up, reading late.

If I can't read, if I can't make a simple Indian pudding, then I don't see the point in living much more, really. Because aside from a good book, and perhaps, a fresh morning in a dew-covered garden, few things in life give me as much pleasure as magic of making a truly spectacular dessert.

It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry.

A book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.

Like a man who pinches himself to make sure he still has feeling, Chimen read to reassure himself that he was still alive.

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.

turn off your television and read a book!

Porridge. Coffee. A whole day of reading ahead of me. Things could be worse. I already have the sleepy feeling I get when I'm reading a good book: like I want to curl up in bed with it and forget about the nonfictional world.

God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.

The longer you look at the idea that we read the Bible to find new meanings, the sillier it becomes. We read and return to the Bible not (just) to find something new but to hear something old, not to discover something fresh but to be reminded of something ancient.

What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.

They have failed to understand the timelessness of Babylon, that Babylon is always with us. One careful reading of the major chapters about Babylon is all one needs to form a Babylonian hermeneutic that provides discernment of Babylon in America and in its churches. Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon.

God did not give the Bible in order that we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. Of course, I think we should read the Bible and know it—but it is the specific element of reading for mastery versus reading to be mastered that grows out of this shortcut.

But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can't find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

But Augustine knew the Bible's main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn't …

Either we don't read the things we claim we do, or we read them with incompetence, preventing ideas in the book from changing our behavior.