Quotes on Reading

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego.

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Reading is the unbelievably healthy way _x000D_ my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. _x000D_ Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to _x000D_ make contact with reality after a day of making things up.

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

I want to remind people of the great and profound joy that can be found in stories, and that stories can connect us to each other, and that reading together changes everybody involved.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.

At the end of the table, the secretary was reading the decision in some case, but in such a mournful and monotonous voice, that the condemned man himself would have fallen asleep while listening to it. The judge, no doubt, would have been the first of all to do so, had he not entered into an engrossing conversation while it was going on.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

If I'm honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.

Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.