Quotes About Reading

con un libro en la mano abro mis atemorizados ojos a un mundo extraño, distinto de aquel en el que me hallaba hace apenas un instante porque yo, cuando me sumerjo en la lectura, estoy en otra parte, dentro del texto, me despierto sorprendido y reconozco con culpa que efectivamente vuelvo de un sueño, del más bello de los mundos, del corazón mismo de la verdad.

BOOKS! I DON'T KNOW IF I EVER TOLD YOU THIS, BUT BOOKS ARE THE GREATEST GIFT ONE CAN GIVE ANOTHER

In the earlier days of freedom almost every coloured man who learned to read would receive "a call to preach" within a few days after he began reading.

Before this I had never cared a great deal about it, but now I learned to love to read the Bible, not only for the spiritual help which it gives, but on account of it as literature.

The lessons taught me in this respect took such a hold upon me that at the present time, when I am at home, no matter how busy I am, I always make it a rule to read a chapter or a portion of a chapter in the morning, before beginning the work of the day.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Sure, okay, enjoy World Book Day but celebrating reading one day a year is like getting some only on Valentine's Day.

Now what good would that have done? They wouldn't know they'd asked a dumb question, but I didn't want to insult them, either. So when they'd ask if I'd read all those books, I'd say, 'Hell, no. Who wants a library full of books you've already read?

A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.

Sometimes being able to read makes more questions than if you were stupid.

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. 

Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtù.

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]