Quotes on Reading

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

Education is a vaccine for violence.

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.

All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.

By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.” His blue eyes were dark with understanding — of course Will would understand.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there, because the job of reading is not to understand the authors intend. The job of reading is to see into other people as we see ourselves.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

I started reading about people of great accomplishment … and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.

The highest branch of solitary amusement is reading; but even in the choice of books the fancy is first employed; for in reading, the heart is touched, till its feelings are examined by the understanding, and the ripening of reason regulate the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments.

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.