Quotes about reading

page 7

“I'm known as a survivor now, I hope so, for the jail thing, bullets and everything, controversies and everything, I hope so. And I want to be in the future known as somebody. You know I want people to be talking about me like you know: "remember when he was real bad, remember when Tupac was real bad". You know what I mean, they do that about a lot of actors now, like John Travolta I read stories like "remember you were wild."”

“Softmindedness often invades religion. ... Softminded persons have revised the Beautitudes to read "Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God." This has led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. ... Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.”

“If you come to a spiritual teacher — or this book — looking for stimulating ideas, theories, beliefs, intellectual discussions, then you will be disappointed. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover and then put away. Live with it, pick it up frequently, and more importantly, put it down frequently, or spend more time holding it than reading it. Many readers will feel naturally inclined to stop reading after each entry, to pause, reflect, become still. It is always more helpful and more important to stop reading than to continue reading. Allow the book to do its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your repetitive and conditioned thinking.”

“And I'm back on my grind
A psychic read my lifeline, told me in my lifetime
My name would help light up the Chicago skyline
And that's why I'm
Seven o'clock, that's primetime
Heaven'll watch, God calling from the hotlines
Why he keep giving me hot lines?
I'm a star, how could I not shine?”

“O learn to read what silent love hath writ: To hear with eyes belongs to love´s fine wit.”

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one.”

“You can never be wise unless you love reading.”

“Enjoy yourself whilst you read!”

“If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.”

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”

“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

“In books and in life, you need to read several pages before someone's true character is revealed.”

“Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.”

“I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”

“Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.”

“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

“I just read them for fun."
"Dictionaries?"
"Yes."
"That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful."
"Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary."
He blinked.
"See?" She said. "Fun.”

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.”

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

“How to Come Out to Your Parents," she read out loud. "LUKE. Don't be ridiculous. Simon's not gay, he's a vampire.”

“She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”

“But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.”

“Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple.”

“There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.”

“Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.”

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.”

“The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”

“One the next corner stood a cinder block restaurant with a hand-painted sign that read CHICKEN & WAFFLES. There was a queue of twenty people outside.
“You Americans have the strangest taste. What planet is this?”

“It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.”

“Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

“Shallan, weren't you supposed to be reading?”
“I… had trouble concentrating.”
“So you came up on deck,” Jasnah said, “to sketch pictures of young men working without their shirts on. You expected this toyour concentration?”

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

“Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”

“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”

“Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.”

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Here's a freebie: Don't play poker with a kid who can read minds.”

“To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.”

“The thread of will-they-or-won't-they was the real driver of every word and glance and shift of body.

So… this was a date, Blay thought. A subtextual negotiation slipcovered in talk of books read and music enjoyed.”

“Reading is not optional.”

“I'm an average person. Is just that I like reading.”

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

“I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.”

“Real reading is a lonely activity.”

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”

“What have you been reading, The Gospel according to St. Bastard?!”

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”

“That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.”

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.”

“Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs.
I wonder how they feel tonight.”

“You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.”

“Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.”

“To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.”

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”

“When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buyfrom a man who's selling fear.”

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”

“It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”

“We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know… Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.”

“Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.”

“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”

“What a pity every child couldn't learn to read under a willow tree…”

“.. holding a book but reading the empty spaces.”

“It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.”

“I'd treat myself to a reading marathon all weekend. All the ice cream I could eat, all the pages I could read..”

“I'm a reading addict. I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.”

“It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”

“And to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

“I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.”

“I read the first chapter ofwhen Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.”

“You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not”—he grabbed for the boy’s hand—“listen.”

“Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.”

“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”

“I like to stretch my mind by reading and writing and watching educational TV shows like The Bachelor to learn the complex mating rituals of heterosexuals.”

“Most of my reading is rereading.”

“Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”

“The more you read, the more things you will know.”

“Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.”

“If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.”

“The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“This book is to be read in bed.”

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”

“What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn't He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things he allowed to happen…”

“It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.”

“I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles."
~ Ithana Aaronson”

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

“He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.”

“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”

“Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze — and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence.”