#reading

"You are not permitted to live and die as a non-entity because you have encountered the greatness that is associated with Christ."

"Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."

"Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read."

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading.It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.It is a moral illumination."

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

"The presence of the Lord destroys a life of struggle. You will struggle until you encounter His presence."

"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."

"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."

"To be the best, you have to be willing to do what nobody does. And today, if nobody reads and nobody works hard, then you also have to give up reading and become lethargic to be successful."

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."

"This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read."

"When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it."

"Don't die without fulfilling your purpose."

"Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning."

"I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."

"Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book."

"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words."

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."