#reading

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

"Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write."

"The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one."

"My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading."

"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!"

"Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."

"He fed his spirit with the bread of books"

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

"Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes."

"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."

"We live and breathe words."

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

"Words are directed to your personalities namely; - God, your hearers, devil and yourself."

"She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?"

"Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list."

"The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything."

"...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books."

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."