Reading Quotes - Page 97

It is good from time to time to recall all those big and little reasons why you wanted to quit smoking in the first place. Reading this blog once in a while might also be helpful

Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.

When I took drum lessons as a kid the teacher would always ask me if I practiced, and I'd be like 'nope' and he'd be like: "Well you're not going to be able to play the beat." So I would ask him to show me, and he'd show me and I'd be able to hear it and play it, so I've always not really been good at reading things.

I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.

After reading a paper by a young theoretical scientist, Pauli, shaking his head sadly, commented: That is not even wrong.

With theatre, you can interpret the most complex play on stage for it have meaning to an audience because you're dealing in images, you're dealing in action, you can use different idioms to interpret and clarify something which is obscured in the reading and of course there are different kinds of play, there are mythological plays, there are what I call the dramatic sketches, direct political theatre which is virtually everybody, but I find that you can use the stage as a social vehicle, you know, which any kind of audience.

Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.

A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.

What is Jordan that I should wash in it? What is the preaching that I should attend on it, while I hear nothing but what I knew before? What are these beggarly elements of water, bread, and wine? Are not these the reasonings of a soul that forgets who appoints the means of grace?

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.

But truths on which depends our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a lustre he that runs may read.

He that runs may read.

The things that mount the rostrum with a skip, And then skip down again, pronounce a text, Cry hem; and reading what they never wrote Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work, And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying.

Say, did you read what this writer just dug up in George Washington's diary? I was so ashamed I sat up all night reading it.