Reading Quotes - Page 10

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?

For a book to be a good one a reader must have a connection with the characters and identify with them and have the story hold their attention and want more

What is reading but silent conversation?

From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

You don't just read a book to find adventure. You read a book to find yourself.

He claimed he had read the book so many times that the words had fallen out of it and the pages were all blank so he had to read the book to put the words back in or the book would be forlorn and naked.

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?I know it can.(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)

You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.

We profit little by books we do not enjoy.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.

I am so happy that I grew up knowing the word of God, the spirit of discernment in me is 24hrs activated, I can differentiate between light and darkness. I put on the amour of God even when the whole world is going to hell, I refuse to join them. The light in me shall overshadow every power of darkness.

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.

Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels.

As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

I often find that once a child unlocks the secret of words, they hunger for them. There is a kind of magic in reading. It takes the mind to places where the body may not go, allowing one to forget, for a while, life's troubles.

Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.

A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it.

If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.' -From a speech by the president of Mount Holyoke College, as reported in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 13, 1938

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)

My pragmatic nature, my impatience, will most likely have me drunk on aged spirit by noon.

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

When a man finds this kind of woman, he will go all out for her knowing that she will not be a letdown.

Our masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they’re also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don’t. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously.

If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.

The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real

Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.

It’s tough, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to do the seemingly impossible.

Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray.

Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

Books … they’re kind of a compulsion for me. To find a great bookstore is a great thing.

People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.

...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.

The point is, every book we had could save us in a different way -- only, we had to open it. We had to drop our eyes to the page and drink in the words that were there.