And he loves to read. He loves the whisper of the pages and the way his fingertips catch on rough paper, the pour of the words up from the leaves, through soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.
My love of books was all that saved me.
Hey, Geekoid!” yelled Duncan Dougal, “Why do you read so much? Don’t you know how to watch TV?
Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
It isn't what the book costs. It's what it will cost you if you don't read it.
Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.
My books are a word feast.
Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you’re speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn’t. It’s addressed to the public.
And no matter what anybody says, I don’t believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I’m concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to read.
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Don’t forget, and don’t let your reader forget, that the small world in which you have held him for the last hour or two hasn’t ended. Be aware, and make him aware, that tomorrow all of its remaining inhabitants will pick up the broken fragments of their lives, and carry on.
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.
Our library isn’t very extensive,” said Anne, “but every book in it is a friend. We’ve picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.
Reading is an activity of civilized beings.
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio’s stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
I also did some jail time a few years ago. Spent a whole summer in jail reading books. I pumped a ton of new knowledge and new thinking into myself.
With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.
I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.
If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word “identity” has reached an end.