Reading Quotes - Page 18

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

Silence is difficult and arduous; it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware - aware of your speech, aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.

Remember that your thoughts are the primary cause of everything. So when you think a sustained thought it is immediately sent out into the Universe. That thought magnetically attaches itself to the like frequency, and then within seconds sends the reading of that frequency back to you through your feelings. Put another way, your feelings are communicated back to you from the Universe, telling you what frequency you are currently on. Your feelings are your frequency feedback mechanism!

I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month, than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines.

Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.

Read in order to live.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world. .. I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome.

Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon--destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroyus. A nation that doesn't read much doesn't know much. And a nation that doesn't know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box and the voting booth...The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is more rewarding than carrying guns.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.