#read

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. ↗

— Laura Miller

#lit #reading #security

You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.” His blue eyes were dark with understanding — of course Will would understand. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#reading #reading-books #tessa-gray #will-herondale #character

Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#character-development #growth #reading #character

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing. ↗

— Jerry Spinelli

#learning-to-read #vowels #baseball

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

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#civilization #civilized #emerson #quote #reading

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#britain #life #reading #school #life

Writing is an escape from life reading is living a different life. ↗

— Sofia Kennedy

#writing #life

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it. ↗

— The Economist

#literature #reading #novel