Quotes About Reading

I become influenced while I'm reading. I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.

MOM LIKED THE Ritalin. And she found it had a terrific and unexpected side effect—it helped her read. The day she first tried it, she was tired and uncomfortable and having trouble concentrating. She popped the Ritalin right before she sat down with Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a fifteen-hundred-page book that she'd been attempting to read after a friend gave it to her.

I did manage to read some pages from a book that's also about how people can find strength they didn't know they had." "What book was that?" "The Book of Common Prayer," Mom answered. "Didion?" "No, Will." Mom's voice was somewhere between amused and exasperated. "The other one." And then she added, smiling: "Besides, I think the Didion is A Book of Common Prayer, not 'The Book.'

Mom agreed but pointed out that she'd been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. "I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

I asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not—I'd read it first.

asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not—I'd read it first. I don't think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn't known what was going to happen. I'd have been way too worried.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time, one could go to New Zealand.' The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference, there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal

I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?

We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we'd both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which had won the Pulitzer in 1999.

The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett

they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.

We can't do much for the people we've lost, but we can remember them and we can read for them: the books they loved, and books we think they might have chosen. Maybe the reading can help us answer the questions they would have asked us if they were still here to ask them. Maybe the reading can help us figure out how to honor their lives and continue their legacies.

remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make. "I think most good books share that theme," Mom said.

Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren't aware of it.

Here is Chang Ch'ao on reading at different times in your life: "Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one's own experience.

There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house—be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room—and that was to have your face buried in a book.

I used to say that the greatest gift you could ever give anyone is a book. But I don't say that anymore because I no longer think it's true. I now say that a book is the second greatest gift. I've come to believe that the greatest gift you can give people is to take the time to talk with them about a book you've shared.

not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In

We'd both already read several novels by Tóibín: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship.

There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent-flier miles, they've traveled so much.

When we ask one another "What are you reading?" sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. "What are you reading?" isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, "Who are you now and who are you becoming?

I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won't be the greatest book ever written—I am certain there isn't such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the rest of my life.

The Uncommon Reader,

Of course," said the Queen, "but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting