#reading

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#reading #life

What is reading but silent conversation. ↗

— Walter Savage Landor

#introspection #reading #introspection

A strong man does not succumb to pressures, he knows that without pressures he will not find pleasures and so he will not be made. ↗

— Jaachynma N.E. Agu

#book-reading #gifts #greatnesstness #jaachynma #nobility

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#healing #hurt #language #reading #words

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives." [Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#culture #identity #reading #self-awareness #self-awareness

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#books #readers #reading #bullying

Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#genre-fiction #reading #historical-fiction

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#funny

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons. ↗

— Stephen King

#writing #writers-on-writing

The pauper is vulnerable to pride and pride is the destroyer of man's glory. ↗

— Jaachynma N.E. Agu

#barack-obama #be-different #book-reading #chiyson #good-life