Quotes about Reading

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Books can be posessive, can't they?  You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved
there on its own, just to get your attention.  Sometimes what's inside will change your life...

BIBLIOBLISS.  Transported into states of transcendent pleasure while immersed in reading a favorite book.

Words, words, words.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

So, how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself.  As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come.

Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading.

The book is an unbearable totality.
I write against a background of facets.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book  rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

...there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read--it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

If you are a man of learning,
read something classic,
a history of the human struggle
and don't settle for mediocre verse.

"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us.  If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

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Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.

Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life,
Meditation perceives it,
Prayer asks for it,
Contemplation tastes it.

He who has a garden and a library wants for nothing.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself." (Hesse in Reading in Bed, ed. by Steven Gilbar, 1974)