#read

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE ↗

— Mark Twain

#preface #reading #warning #motivational

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus. ↗

— Francine Prose

#chekhov #literature #reading #art

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener. ↗

— Paula Fox

#children #reading #nature

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#face #gift #handsomeness #looks #reading

All books are escapism. They are life with the boring bits cut out. ↗

— Jean Chapman

#life

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#end #fiction #life #reading #stories

Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#forster #life #philosophy #where-angels-fear-to-tread #life

It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and dispair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicise the fact too widely, certainly not in sophisticated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the FUN in that? ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#art

The point of reading is not reading but living. Reading helps you live with greater appreciation, keener insight and heightened emotional awareness. ↗

— Steve Leveen

#life

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing quite what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer. All readers were equal and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised. ↗

— Alan Bennett

#equality