Quotes About Reading

Two days ago, in the afternoon, Amanda said to me, I can't read books any more. Who has the time? It was the day after Oliver had left, and we were in this little café in the industrial part of the city. Who can concentrate any more? she said, stirring her coffee. Who reads? Do you read? (I shook my head.) Somebody must read, I guess. You see all these books around in store windows, and there are those clubs. Somebody's reading, she said. Who? I don't know anybody who reads.

La letteratura, poi, ha questo di bello: che puoi riacciuffarla in un momento qualunque del tuo percorso, che non scade mai, che non abbandona mai davvero le librerie.

Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

I have a bad habit of starting a book and reading just far enough to make sure I want to read it and look forward to reading and then putting it to one side while I break the ice on a couple more. In that way, when I feel dull and depressed which is too often, I know I have something to read late at night when I do most of it and not that horrid blank feeling of not having anybody to talk to or listen to.

Los editores y otros deberían dejar de preocuparse por la pérdida de clientela que puede causarles la televisión. El tipo que puede soportar un trío de anuncios de desodorantes para mirar a Flashgun Casey y tragarse los elogios a cervezas o a planes usuarios de crédito para poder ver a un par de boxeadores de cuarta frotándose las narices contra las cuerdas no es alguien que vaya a perder tiempo leyendo libros.

This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time- putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any attention to them.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.

I have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into the distance so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling

You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the same way you furnish a house with books.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

When I read, I ceased to be my-self, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug.

To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writer are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Sidda can't help herself, She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves those black letters marching across the white pages.

Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

L'essentiel est de lire beaucoup. N'importe quoi. Ce qu'on a envie de lire. Le tri se fait après. Et même la mauvaise littérature est nourricière. La seule littérature stérilisante, la littérature prétentieuse, philosophisante, cuistre, est sans danger pour les enfants parce qu'ils ne peuvent pas pénétrer dedans. Ils la rejettent, comme ils tournent le bouton de la T.V. au moment des discours politiques. Ce sont des sages.

And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.