Quotes About Reading

as [ale] is the liquor of modern historians,..., it ought likewise to be the potation of their readers, since every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ.

I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience—or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.

I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.

It's very silly," she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it.

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.

Au fond, les gens ne lisent pas ; ou, s'ils lisent, ils ne comprennent pas ; ou, s'ils comprennent, ils oublient.

Je commençais à lire, à trop lire. Je me tournais vers le dedans, je me refermais sur moi-même, comme font les fleurs, la nuit.

And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is. Without the enthusiastic reader, who is really the author's counterpart and very often his most secret rival, a book would die.

Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time. . . .

When you visit your analyst does he ask you what you read when using the stool? He should, you know. To an analyst it should make a great difference whether you read one kind of literature in the toilet and another elsewhere. It should even make a difference to him whether you read or do not read—in the toilet. Such matters are unfortunately not widely enough discussed. It is assumed that what one does in the toilet is one's own private affair. It is not. The whole universe is concerned.

Contemplando el pasado, parece que siempre leí en posición incómoda. (Que es la forma en que escriben la mayoría de los escritores, según compruebo). Pero lo leído penetró. Lo importante es, y debo recalcarlo, que leía sin desviar la atención con todas mis facultades que poseía.

Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.

My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

Obviously fitness matters and at a certain age batsmen get the knack, batsmen get an idea how to get runs and I think he got the idea about 2-3 years ago how to get runs, what sort of shots to play and reading the situation.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new.

In an age of never-ending health fads, it's comforting to learn that one of the healthiest activities you can do has existed for millennia. It's called reading. Yes, books are not just entertaining or educational: they can also improve your mental health.

Yes, I don't read books for entertainment.

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.

And I'm auditioning right now for a movie, and then I have a script that I'm reading right now for a horror film, and I'm meeting for a couple of television shows that I just had yesterday, and pretty much was offered one of them.