Quotes About Reading

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Reading stories forces us to exercise our empathy and imagination muscles, and that helps us conceive what the Bible depicts or demands, helps us connect with others, helps us illustrate what the text teaches, and helps us apply the text's truths.

Great books make great readers,129 and exposure to lofty thoughts is a challenging and inspiring experience. Loftier thoughts than Isaiah's, recorded in chapters 40–66 of his prophecy, are scarcely to be found.

If God really did write a book, we ought to be reading it, studying it, memorizing it, and letting it guide our lives.

No sensible person would prefer a computer screen to a well printed page for reading text

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Heisenberg).

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.

Here's a freebie: Don't play poker with a kid who can read minds.

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they live behind...

She started reading novels to put herself in the way of secret lives.

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

Read. Read everything in the genre in which you want to write, but don't limit yourself. Read broadly. The best teacher of writing is a good book.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

Good writers are good readers.

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

my diddy said it was something wrong with any man that'll sit down in a chair and read a book.

It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

A book," Nellie confided in her diary, "has more fascination for me than anything else.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt "the greatest of companions." Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

When I read aloud," Lincoln later explained, "two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.