“The only things that she cares about are a comfortable chair, a good reading light, and enough books and magazines.”
“Some people say Shakespeare should be experienced in the theater, not read. This is only the case for people with weak minds.”
“Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged, adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book.”
“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself.”
“El verbo leer, como el verbo amar y el verbo soñar, no soporta ‘el modo imperativo’. Yo siempre les aconsejé a mis estudiantes que si un libro los aburre lo dejen; que no lo lean porque es famoso, que no lean un libro porque es moderno, que no lean un libro porque es antiguo. La lectura debe ser una de las formas de la felicidad y no se puede obligar a nadie a ser feliz. The verb reading, like the verb to love and the verb dreaming, doesn t bear the imperative mode. I always advised to my students that if a book bores them leave it; That they don t read it because it s famous, that they don t read a book because it s modern, that they don t read a book because it s antique. The reading should be one of the ways of happiness and nobody can be obliged to be happy.”
“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don t read, you will never be a filmmaker.”
“Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicorn—unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.”
“We sometimes allow someone—because of their confidence and our uncertainty—to ‘correct’ us where we are right, and they are wrong.”
“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn t about reading the words; it s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
“The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture—exploit the new thing then move on. There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are.”
“A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
“It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”
“كنت حينما يسألني أحد أصدقاء العائلة: سمعنا أن هوايتك القراءة..صحيح؟ فأجيبهم: بل حياتي القراءة، الطعام والشراب يمكن تصنيفهم قي خانة الهوايات، أما القراءة فهي ضرورة لحياتي. التنفس يعطيني عامل البقاء في الحياة، بينما القراءة تعطيني المبرر..”
“To read is to cover one s face. And to write is to show it.”
“There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.”
“He said it was the kind of book you made your own.”
“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”