Best 7930 quotes in «reading quotes» category

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!

I think, therefore I am? No, I simply am. I am. I am. I am. I will still be if I didn't think. In fact, it is only then that I would step into a different dimension of consciousness. Yes, I will still be if I didn't think. I will still be if I stopped breathing. I will still be because you still are. My words are written and you are receiving them. We are dancing. We are making love. And when you stop reading them, they will still be because nothing ever truly ceases to exist. There is not a thing that is not. Every thought, energy, and vibration is recycled. I am and I will continue to be because I manifest as the universe, therefore I will continue to manifest as the universe.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.

It is a blessing for which young people ought to be exceedingly thankful, when they have wise and kind and sympathising and intelligent friends (parents especially) who know how to guide them to pure sources of instruction from books, so as on one hand to gratify a natural taste for novelty and entertainment, and on the other, to control that taste within proper bounds; taking conscientious care, at all times, to keep from the young that instruction which ‘causeth to err.

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. -C.S. Lewis in Introduction to Athanasius' "On the Incarnation)

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

It is better to read one intellectually challenging book every 12 months … than to read 12 entertaining books every month.

It is better to pick up a book than to pick up ignorance.

It is called education because it is learned. You do not have to have had an experience in order to sympathize or empathize with the subject. That is why books are written: so that we do not have to do the same things. We learn from experience, true; but we also learn from empathy.” A Theory of Patience

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get. There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.

It is equally important to learn from experience and from books.

It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.

It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.

It is impossible to enjoy divine protection without the word of God. You must be a word addict.

It is impossible to become the best version of yourself if you do not read, exercise, and meditate.

It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.

It is neither poor handling nor the weather that turns the pages of a book a fine sepia. It is the reader's imagination.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

[I]t is not hasty reading--but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee’s touching of the flower, which gathers honey--but her abiding for a time upon the flower, which draws out the sweet. It is not he who reads most--but he who meditates most, who will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer's imagination.

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream.

It is not your duty to run from the devil but resist him and he will flew from you.

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of a good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)

It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time.

It is that kind of thinking that is the problem; that movies, video games and the Internet, devices that simply amuse the imagination are more interesting than what a library stocks.

It is weird to me on how people will come to church frequently and have absolutely no desire or intention to change anything about their life based on what they experienced in the church.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.

It'll be dark soon, Rudy.' He walked on. 'So what?' 'I'm going back.' Rudy stopped and watched her now as if she were betraying him. 'That's right, book thief. Leave me now. I bet if there was a lousy book at the end of this road, you'd keep walking. Wouldn't you?

It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.

It may be escapist, but if I have a choice between watching the news or reading a book which gets me to see the world through different eyes, I will always choose the latter!

It never registered to them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore. (The White Azalea)

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life.

I try not to cringe. Dog-earing a book feels like a violation of some sacred unspoken rule.

It only took Alexis a day to read a five-hundred page book. Fiction stories took her to another world where she could lose herself for a while in someone else’s life. Its funny how things like loans to pay back, a broken home and family, and a future to worry about meant nothing to characters who only had to worry about things like boys, beaches and fun.

I took a speed-reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read "War and Peace" in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.

It plumps up your thinker and fills up your heart. And where you end up is not where you start.

It’s a lot to process,” she said. “ What Sebastian said, what happened last night, everything. I need to sleep, but I’ m too keyed up. When I was young and I couldn’t sleep, my mother used to read to me to relax me.” 'And I remind you of your mother now? I have got to look into a manlier cologne

It's amazing how the more you read, the less you know.

It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.

it's doesn't matter how long you spend the time writing words , the only thing that matter , is for how long your words will have an influence on their reader .