#ding

Read. You can always talk with another reader. ↗

— Rorke Denver

#life-lessons #reading #life

You can’t label yourself with words, it is what you do everyday that defines you. ↗

— Raimy Diaz

#meaningful-living #routine-of-daily-life #who-am-i #life

you must find yourself before you can know where you belong, yet to find yourself first you must know who you are. However, you will never really know who you are if you are always allowing other people to define who you should be, so be yourself and if you are still unsure of who you are then reinvent yourself. ↗

— Andrew James Pritchard

#finding-oneself #life #life

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#readers-and-writers #reading #writing #writing-craft #writing-process

Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned. ↗

— Susan Coolidge

#reading #family

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it. ↗

— Amy Bloom

#happy-endings #life

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#torture #waterboarding #experience

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolve

#literature #reading #experience

I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss -- ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. ↗

— Jane Austen

#reading #snobbery #words #imagination

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#rereading #love