#ding

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional. ↗

— Walter Dean Myers

#life

CHOICE NOT CHNACE DETERMINES DESTINY ↗

— P. RAWAT

#understanding #life

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch. ↗

— Vikram Seth

#effort

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#christianity #clarity #display #hoarding #horror

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

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint. ↗

— Garry Trudeau

#actually #after #altered #attainable #been

And when you're on your own there is that terrifying possibility that you may be the only person on the planet who thinks it's funny - and you have no way of finding out. ↗

— Denis Norden

#funny #may #only #out #own

I'm not prepared for holding office any more than I think Arnold is. ↗

— Edward James Olmos

#arnold #holding #i #i think #more