Reading Quotes (page 27)
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He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.
Thomas Love Peacock
In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory.
W. Somerset Maugham
I cried, a bit, as a spoke to Belinda on my mobile phone, in a quiet corner, perhaps the only quiet corner in Jaipur. I told her how I'd hoped Paul would read the forward, that he'd read how much I admired his work and how much I admired him, how much I just plain liked him and loved him. But, even as I spoke, I knew: Paul had always known that. He'd seen in on my face every time we met. What made me cry was the obvious, stupid fact that we'd never meet again.
Roddy Doyle
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
Nick Hornby
I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
Joseph Epstein
To be frank with you, Melchior, I have almost the same feeling since I read your explanation.——It fell at my feet during the first vacation days. I was startled. I fastened the door and flew through the flaming lines as a frightened owl flies through a burning wood——I believe I read most of it with my eyes shut.
Frank Wedekind
I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books. Then I devised a plan of study for myself, tracing obscure sciences, one after another, from the dawn of knowledge to the present. Eventually I exhausted even that, and beginning at the great ebony case that stands in the center of the room we of the library have maintained for three hundred ...
Gene Wolfe
What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader's mind just as it left the writer's -- without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought -- it has been read to no purpose.
Edith Wharton
I want to be the apostle of self destruction. I want my book to affect man’s reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me and…to kill themselves.
Leonid Andreyev
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian Mcewan