#read

We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#life

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz ↗

— William L.K.

#kindle-books #science-fiction #short-story #worth-reading #science

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

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

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind tham lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be. ↗

— Francis Spufford

#life

Fiction does something unique in that it takes us out of our heads and puts us into other people's heads. And I think reading, and experiencing fiction through reading, is something that gives us empathy. And that, I think, is vital. It takes us out of our lives. Without reading, you're stuck with one life. Reading gives you more than one life. It gives you an infinite number of lives, which I think is wonderful. Or at least, not infinite, but as many as there are books on the shelves. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#life

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer. ↗

— Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#meaning-of-life #reading #life

Read. You can always talk with another reader. ↗

— Rorke Denver

#life-lessons #reading #life

There's a fine line between being brave and just not giving a shit anymore. ↗

— Sara Furlong Burr

#indie-author #indie-books #science-fiction-romance #science

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#literature #reading #words #writing #funny