Quotes About Reading

He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

Dinner parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. But the people in question are the same. We would have liked to know Mme de Pompadour, who was so stalwart a patron of the arts, and we would have been as bored in her company as we are among all the modern Egerias108 at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so mediocre is their company.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of a spiritual life. It can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.

The end of a book's wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l'esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle, quand la vérité ne nous apparaît plus comme un idéal que nous ne pouvons réaliser que par le progrès intime de notre pensée et par l'effort de notre cœur...

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those we had regarded as not being lived at all : the days spent wholly with a favourite book

But Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin spent part of the year in the country. Even in Paris, being an invalid, she was largely confined to her own room. It is true that the drawbacks of this mode of existence were noticeable chiefly in her choice of expressions which she supposed to be fashionable and which would have been more appropriate to the written language, a distinction that she did not perceive, for she derived them more from reading than from conversation.

Lo primero y lo más íntimo que yo sentía,..., que gobernaba todo lo demás, era mi creencia en la riqueza filosófica y la belleza del libro que estaba leyendo y mi deseo de apropiármelas, de cualquier libro que se tratara

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

But except Cinq-Mars I have never been able to read a thing by M. de Vigny. I get so bored that the book falls from my hands.

the fine binding of his volume of Balzac I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comédie Humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted to the same topic: "Either one thing or the other, a tiny miniature like the Curé de Tours and the Femme abandonnée, or one of the great frescoes like the series of Illusions perdues. What! You've never read Illusions perdues?

I had not yet reached this stage. At one time it was my memory made more clear by some intellectual excitement — such as reading a book — which revived my grief, at other times it was on the contrary my grief — when it was aroused, for instance, by the anguish of a spell of stormy weather — which raised higher, brought nearer to the light, some memory of our love.

Enquanto a leitura for para nós a iniciadora cujas chaves mágicas abrem no fundo de nós mesmos a porta de moradas em que não conseguiríamos penetrar, seu papel em nossa vida será salutar

Bizim için büyülü anahtarlar? olan içimizdeki derin, nüfuz edemeyece?imiz yerlerin kap?lar?n? açan yol gösterici oldu?u sürece, okuman?n ya?am?m?zdaki rolü sa??lt?c?d?r.

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

i tuoi romanzi ... sono sempre rimasti in camera da letto, umilmente, accanto a te; li prendevi in prestito oppure, quando li compravi, li regalavi subito, desiderosa com'eri di passare ad altri il piacere di quelle letture. ... (pagina 78)

Il piacere della lettura rischiai di perderlo per eccesso di analisi, in fin dei conti è questo che nelle università si fa con i libri: li si analizza. Quindi abbandonai i corsi e approfittai degli appunti e della magnifica biblioteca per dedicarmi, anima e corpo, coricata sull'unico divano di casa nostra, alla lettura, Il Cile stava crollando mentre io flirtavo con il bel Mr. Darcy o spalancavo le porte alla dimora di Brideshead.

and [thanks] to Ludmila Parks for explaining to me that the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who have read the Brothers Karamazov and those who have not.

Orwell's vision of our terrible future was that world-- the world in which books are banned or burned. Yet it is not the most terrifying world I can think of. I think instead of Huxley-- ...I think of his Brave New World. His vision was the more terrible, especially because now it appears to be rapidly coming true, whereas the world of 1984 did not. What's Huxley's horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read one.

Orwell's vision of our terrible future [...] - the world in which books are banned. What is Huxley's horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read them'.

A home without books is a body without soul.