#reading

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ↗

— Peter Sloterdijk

#grammar #humanism #language #reading #dreams

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#literature #reading #dreams

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. ↗

— David Mitchell

#escape #reading #real

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble. ↗

— Peter S. Jennison

#censorship #education #illiteracy #reading #education

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth.  But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#dreams #emotion #feelings #reading #richelle

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. ↗

— Peter S. Beagle

#books #dreams #heroes #imagination #reading

Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. ↗

— Tim Gillespie

#literature #reading #dreams

That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#reading #dreams

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. ↗

— Walter Moers

#reading #dreams

I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. ↗

— Amy Plum

#die-for-me #escape #kate #loneliness #reading