Quotes About Reading

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ....

If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

The moment that counts most for me is the moment that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. At times it is the incipit of the book, the first sentences... In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

Tu casa, al ser el lugar donde lees, puede decirnos cuál es el lugar que los libros tienen en tu vida, si son una defensa que tú interpones para mantener alejado al mundo de fuera, un sueño en el que te hundes como en una droga, o bien si son puentes que lanzas hacia el exterior, hacia el mundo que te interesa tanto que quieres multiplicar y dilatar sus dimensiones a través de los libros.

Cái làm cho s? làm tình và s? ??c gi?ng nhau nh?t là, ? c? hai s? ?y, th?i gian và không gian ??u m?, khác v?i th?i gian và không gian ?o l??ng ???c.

Among your books, in this assortment that does not make up a library, a dead or dormant part can still be distinguished, which is the store of volumes put aside, books read and rarely reread, or books you have not and will not read but have still retained (and dusted), and then a living part, which is the books you are reading or plan to read or from which you have not yet detached yourself or books you enjoy handling, seeing around you.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!

As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues...And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman...

I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I'm afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.

??c là ni?m cô ??n.

For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.

Prendi la posizione più comoda: seduto, sdraiato, raggomitolato, coricato. Coricato sulla schiena, su un fianco, sulla pancia. In poltrona, sul divano, sulla sedia a dondolo, sulla sedia a sdraio, sul pouf. Sull'amaca, se hai un'amaca. Sul letto, naturalmente, o dentro il letto. Puoi anche metterti a testa in giù, in posizione yoga, col libro capovolto, si capisce.

I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable.

I expect readers to read in my books something I didn't know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn't know.

Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story.

Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.

He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to light the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up....

Reading means stripping yourself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…" she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same.

At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.

I read, therefore it writes