Quotes About Engagement

Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.

Concentration is another name for what we have called activity in reading. The good reader reads actively, with concentration.

The trouble with life in America today is not that we work too much but that our free time is too much engaged in play and amusement so that too little of it is left for the kind of leisure activities that really are the most profitable part of human life.

STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS

Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children the best simply by noticing them.

It's not that kind of game, Han, she said, her voice sounding like she wished he would grow up and face reality already. The object isn't to win. It's to stay in it as long as you can.

Low periods are a good time to work out the techniques and ways of involving people, ways of having people begin to use critical judgments. In a movement period, it's too late after you get going to stop and do these things. People are too busy doing something else.

There's no such thing as neutrality. The people who use that label are people who unknowingly, for the most part, are dedicated to the support of the status quo.

People generally fall into one of three groups: the few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens. Every person is either a creator of fact or a creature of circumstance. He either puts color into his environment, or, like a chameleon, takes color from his environment.

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

When a writer puts words on paper, it is an intimate act. The reader hears your words in his voice and he becomes the bones of your story. The reader is the foundation that you wrap in muscle and sinew. You build the hero on the reader's delicate frame until your story is his story. Your sorrow is his; your joy is a communion you both celebrate.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

everyone's place to do it

this kind of story intrinsically satisfying.

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

he liked picking Hector's brains on international subjects, or rather, allowing Hector's brains to flow over him in a glowing lava of thought.

If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.

I can relate to the novelist Carrie Brown...who described herself as being 'a promiscuous reader.' I'll give almost any book a chance to have its way with me.

His blue gaze was intent and not even when a drunk undergrad bumped into the back of his chair and mumbled a slurred, "Sorry, mate," did his gaze waver from mine.

But just now, he'd gotten on his knees and proposed marriage, like in a television commercial for a diamond ring. Except of course they had the roll of duct tape instead, which, when you came to think about it, was a far more practical item. Such a bad mistake it would be, to embark on marriage and adult life without a nice supply of duct tape.

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke ("more signs of the Apocalypse!"). Which is another way of looking away.

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.5

During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing "activists" and "regular people" became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.