#ding

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

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

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#criticism #literature #reading #art

Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world. ↗

— Laura Malone Elliott

#novels #plays #poetry #reading #music

...I still cannot tap on your walls and discover by the hollow or firm sounds which of your walls are merely decorative, and which ones hold everything up. ↗

— Philip J. Hilts

#memory #personality #understanding-others #nature

The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#nature

The good news is that I read the book, and because of its fantasy nature, I could not pretend that I was in the book. That way I could participate and still read. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#reading #wallflower #nature

Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening. ↗

— Italo Calvino

#lectophilia #mixed-marriages-never-work #reading #relationship-nightmare #run-away

I would drink that whole bottle if I knew it wouldn’t get me completely drunk. I miss wine.” “Um, you haven’t had it for one night, and you miss it?” “Clearly, you underestimate my relationship with wine and what I do on the weekends when I’m by myself reading. ↗

— Rachel Van Dyken

#reading #the-bet #wine #relationship