#read

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ↗

— John Andrew Holmes

#always #apprehend #beautiful #beautifully #feel

The books weren't exactly Linnet's general reading fare, but a desperate woman will read anything. ↗

— Eloisa James

#reading #beauty

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#blood-vessels #dissolve #infusion #reading #sentences

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. ↗

— Leon Wieseltier

#reading #beauty

Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense. ↗

— John Barton

#censor #curiosity #diverse #does #empathy

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread. ↗

— B.R. Myers

#classics #reading #business

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal. ↗

— Michael Cox

#reading #business

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#reading #travel #change

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#reading #writing #change

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#ideas #reading #words #change