People really want to think that these things really happened. I don’t know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn’t thinking about the big picture. I didn’t notice what they said on television, I wasn’t reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.
A few years after my first son was born, he wanted to know how we chose his name, so I began reading him the story of Noah’s Ark.
I think that my love of cooking grew out of my love of reading about cooking. When I was a kid, we had a bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. I would eat all my meals reading about meals I could have been having.
You do better in the gym with a trainer; you don’t figure out how to cook without reading a recipe. Therapy is not something to be embarrassed about.
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she’d found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.
The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me – I have no others.
During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.
After my divorce, I was struggling to find my own voice. Through reading, I gained my power back.
I thought, maybe the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing. I made up my mind I would know my letters.
Studying goes deeper than mere reading. There are surface nuggets to be gathered but the best of the gold is underneath, and it takes time and labor to secure it.
The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life.
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.