quotations and passages on reading

reading

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Anyone who says they have only one life
to live must not know how to read a book.

unattributed

Properly, we should read for power. A person reading should be a person
intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hands.

Ezra Pound

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself
a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

As a child raised in rural communities with few libraries, I was thrilled when
the bookmobile rolled into my area every other week. With my books strapped
to the back carrier of my bike, I would eagerly pedal a little more than a mile to
where the bookmobile was parked. Happily fortified with new reading selections,
I’d pedal back home, clamor up the makeshift ladder to my tree house, and settle in.
When was the last time you settled in for a mindlessly pleasant read? Why don’t
you do that more often? What’s driving you continually to be productive? Perhaps
some of you, like me, are missing out on the recreational activity that has no
purpose other than to give a needed respite from our task-oriented lives.

Marilyn Meberg

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read
to remember and those who read to forget.

William Lyon Phelps

In real life I have qualms, a moral code, a sense of duty. I live within
confines. In books, I am free to soar and to explore. There are no
limits to my being.
Books, with their secret knowledge, free me from myself. I'm never
alone. The greatest minds in history wait by my bed, sit patiently in
bookcases, respond to my touch. I reach out and they are there,
waiting to transport me to another realm.

Linda Weltner

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book
than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

Clifton Fadiman

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee

There are books so alive
that you're always afraid
that while you weren't
reading, the book has gone
and changed, has shifted like
a river; while you went on
living, it went on living too,
and like a river moved on and
moved away. No one has stepped
twice into the same river
But did anyone ever step twice
into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We
need the 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 ax for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire
deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading
are precisely those that challenge our convictions.

unattributed

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough,
but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

François Mauriac

The person who does not read good books has no advantage over the person who can't read them.

Mark Twain

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.

Charles Dudley Warner

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Edmund Burke

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

Paul Sweeney

Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt,
to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have
no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels,
devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such
obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't
expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious
indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just
between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

Henry Ward Beecher

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To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend;
to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.

Chinese Saying

The time to read is any time: no
apparatus, no appointment of time
and place, is necessary. It is the only
art which can be practised at any hour
of the day or night, whenever the time
and inclination comes, that is your time for
reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

Holbrook Jackson

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this
polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Harold Bloom

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

Henry Miller

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better
understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

André Maurois


Over a year of one-sentence reminders of ways that we can make the most of our lives each day that we live. Book - Kindle - Nook	A novel of life and learning; Walker's fascinating journey will remind you of all that is good in this world. Book - Kindle Read Chapter One	When David agrees to give 70-year-old Hector a ride west, he never thinks that the man will become so important to him. Book - Kindle Read Chapter One	"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," wrote Wordsworth over 150 years ago. And we're still doing the same. Book - Kindle