#reading

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out."

"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."

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

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

"Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems."

"Reading makes you ready for the world. A man who doesn’t read is a man who is easily deceived. You must find that man and make him sign a contract, and you must do it before Satan does. Trust me, the profits are HUGE!"

"My stomach is rather content, now that I think about it. 'Tis my mind that is starving."

"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."

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

"I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books."

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."

"The problem with books is that they end."

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."

"For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer."

"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."

"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."

"You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one."