Reading Quotes - Page 65

If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading.

To believe a thing is to see the cool crystal water sparkling in the cup. But to meditate on it is to drink of it. Reading gathers the clusters; contemplation squeezes forth their generous juice.

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.

A dominant dog can get another dog to move out of its way just by the energy it projects. You can tell a lot about a dog's position in the pack by how they hold themselves around other dogs. When reading a dog's body language, you can't do it intellectually. You can only do it by using your instincts.

I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not conciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

Ben remembered reading about curators in "Wonderstruck", and thought about what id meant to curate your own life, as his dad had done here. What would it be like to pick and choose the objects and stories that would go in your own cabinet? How would Ben curate his own life? And then, thinking about his museum box, and his house, and his books, and the secret room, he realized he'd already begun doing it. Maybe, thought Ben, we are all cabinets of wonders.

He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!... Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.

Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don't keep reading the book. You have to travel. That's what practice is about. Traveling. Walking the path.

A 1977 poll of American astronomers, published in JSE, showed the following. Out of 2611 questionnaires 1356 were returned. In response to whether the UFO problem deserved further study the replies were: 23% certainly, 30% probably, 27% percent possibly, 17% probably not, 3% certainly not. Interestingly, there was a positive correlation between the amount of reading done on the subject and the opinion that further study was in order.

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.