She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Reading maketh a full man.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
I suggest a nationwide reading of the Holy Scriptures during the period from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas.
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.
The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.
The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author’s book at all, but rather in the reader’s head.
A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?
When I’m not actually doing my work, I’m planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests. I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.
If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.