Books succeed; and lives fail.
Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?
It sounds so geeky, but I really do like studying and reading, and if I’m not working on ‘Harry Potter,’ then my greatest relaxation is to sit with a book.
It’s important to read because it’s really good for your vocabulary. It’s really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing.
Even worse than seeing women’s privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
Easy writing makes hard reading.
I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
Well, I can’t describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.
You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.
And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.