Explore Quotes on Reading

When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

Empathically accurate perceivers are those who are consistently good at 'reading' other people's thoughts and feelings. All else being equal, they are likely to be the most tactful advisors, the most diplomatic officials, the most effective negotiators, the most electable politicians, the most productive salespersons, the most successful teachers, and the most insightful therapists.

Congress' passing of the omnibus spending bill without reading it shows more than anything why they can't be trusted.

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'.

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

All ballet, all reading, all music. That was my world, my inner world.

A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Philadelphia is the only city, where you can experience the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it the next day.

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly_x000D_attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our_x000D_young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making,_x000D_societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex_x000D_between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of_x000D_reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will_x000D_of God.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I remember failing reading in school at a young age, and you just kinda get left behind and I felt helpless.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.

You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that.

Reading newspapers in the state of Maine is like paying somebody to tell you lies.