#din

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus. ↗

— Francine Prose

#chekhov #literature #reading #art

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#reading #understanding #wicked #words #change

People are always trying to understand. There is only one way to do that. It is to discover < + i + >why< + i + > you want to understand. ↗

— Idries Shah

#technique #understanding #motivational

I wish we could go to the movies." I stared at him. "We're in a creepy dungeon. There's a chance I might die in the next few hours. You are going to die in the next few hours. And if you had one wish, it would be to catch a movie? ↗

— Rachel Hawkins

#demonglass #impending-doom #movies #rachel-hawkins #sophie

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#movies

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. ↗

— Roger Ebert

#bookstores #history #literature #philosophy #reading

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. ↗

— John Fowles

#movies #reading #movies

Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over ("Remember last night?"), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. (In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.) ↗

— Ann Beattie

#ordinariness #ordinary-life #men

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading #music

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ↗

— Gilbert Highet

#reading #music