#ding

I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions") ↗

— Michael Marshall Smith

#proofreading #change

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them." [Life magazine, December 10, 1965] ↗

— Rex Stout

#ideas #nature #reading #thought #life

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #reading #change

The idea that so many kids eat rubbish and sit on computers all day long appals me and getting them into sport is a major way of getting them off computers and leading healthier lives. ↗

— Kirsty Gallacher

#computers #day #eat #getting #healthier

Life is very tough and fragile at the same time, it never backs down or surrenders, but will break open to reveal its beauty and ugliness. As a evening primrose that blooms in the flooding moonlight, just before being trampled upon underfoot by the four-legged frost of the night. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#change #flooding #flower #fragile #frost

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often. ↗

— Julio Cortázar

#reading #age

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#reading #communication

Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. At other times, it is allowing another to take yours. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#communication #connecting #connection #hands #holding-hands

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#knowledge #languages #travel #understanding #communication

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] ↗

— Harper Lee

#communication #computers #critical-thinking #modern-life #reading