#reading

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

"There's a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day."

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."

"Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,"she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles."

"I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all."

"You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil."

"We live and breathe words."

"My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"I don't want to be in my car all day. I love getting up in the morning in Venice and walking my dogs down to the cafe to get my tea, and then perhaps going to a bookstore and sitting and reading, then walking to the beach."

"I’ve found newspapers only useful as kindling material for campfires. It’s been said that newspaper articles are written at a fifth grade reading level. If so, I can’t figure out why journalists would write something that the average high school senior can’t even read."

"Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever."

"I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey."

"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."