#read

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

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#imagination #reading #imagination

Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta. ↗

— David Mitchell

#book #books #español #lectura #leer

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#reading #sexy #smell #wonderful #love

No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally worth reading at the age of 50. ↗

— Gladys Hunt

#inspirational #reading #age

I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow. ↗

— Siegfried Sassoon

#reading #war #humor

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#humor #life #philosophy #reading #humor

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#books #criticism #humor #interpretation #literature