Quotes About Reading

and said that he still had his evening's reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise, despite his notetaking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author.

La gente non legge pensando all'arte: legge pensando alle persone. E le giudica per quello che sono. E come credi che giudicherà i personaggi del tuo racconto? A quali conclusioni credi che arriverà? Ci hai pensato?

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.

They don't know about art. Maybe I don't know about art myself. Maybe none of our family does, not the way that you do. But that's my point. People don't read art—they read about people.

La mia mente divaga, - mi disse, un po' come se io fossi un medico passato di lí per informarmi sui suoi strani e inquietanti nuovi sintomi. - Arrivato in fondo alla pagina cerco di riassumere ciò che ho letto, e la mia mente è vuota: sono rimasto seduto in poltrona senza far niente. Certo, ho sempre letto i libri con la penna in mano, ma ora scopro che se non lo faccio, anche quando leggo una rivista, la mia attenzione non resta concentrata su quello che ho davanti a me.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts laments the loss of "deep reading," which requires intense concentration, a conscious lowering of the gates of perception, and a slower pace.

After reading binge prompted by convalescence, As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace.

Lewis was "the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read

The great thing is to be always reading but never to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice!

Barthes me lisait, donc on s'est rencontrés.

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

A house that has a library in it has a soul.

I think when a reader reads a whole book - which takes six to ten hours - that's kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I'm grateful for it.

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.

I am not usually such a sluggard, he said, as we walked quickly along the street, but yesterday evening I got a novel. I ought not to read novels. When I do, I am apt to make a single mouthful of it; and that is what I did last night. I started the book at nine and finished it at two this morning; and the result is that I am as sleepy as an owl even now.

He'd been happier in abandoned places, so long as they were quiet and had enough light to read by.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own. But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away.

Some say that women should not read, for they may be led astray into impurity, as if our women are not fit guardians of their own worthiness.

even the required Smart Librarian glasses.

The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.

Bruises mapped my body from bumping into tables and tripping over curbs while walking with a book in my hand, my eyes focused on the pages instead of the live space around me.

I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.