Quotes About Reading

The results also reinforce something that Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. "How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

That hasn't happened. Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense "sensuous involvement" with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a "considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

In Google's world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought.

We've reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State's Joe O'Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn't read books but that he doesn't see any particular need to read them.

reading books chronically understimulates the senses."11

A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly "through pages instead of reading them carefully.

hypertext readers often "could not remember what they had and had not read.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.

tsundoku – a word that required a sentence in English: buying books and piling them up on a shelf without reading them.

Seeing her books reassured her, made her feel calm.

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom ' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don't ever rush into print.

You must remember this: You can never have a Christian mind without reading the Scriptures regularly because you cannot be profoundly influenced by that which you do not know.

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction?

One could prefix the words deranged lunatic insists to any headline, and only increase its accuracy. It's practically implied, and the reading public would hardly read the little phrase as a disclaimer these days.

Good surveillence and good books don't mix.

My flash, your blue place. I did some reading. Psychology books call it flow. They talk about losing awareness of your surroundings, about being swept up in the tide-not exactly surrender, but a kind of letting go.