#reading

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#age

You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman." "Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep I followed them. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#radio #read #reading #reading-books #sleep-walking

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language. ↗

— Muriel Barbery

#language #reading #beauty

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government. ↗

— John Sharp Williams

#bad government #convinces #government #grown #history

Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain. ↗

— James Wolcott

#believe #best #bring #collections #enjoy

The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age. ↗

— Isaac D'Israeli

#reading #age

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures. ↗

— Sven Birkerts

#age

Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count. ↗

— Walter Tevis

#age

By then, [1737]...the French were taking advantage of the new "reading rooms" created by architects such as Blondel and of new seat furniture and had begun a practice we now call curling up with a good book. ↗

— Joan DeJean

#age

He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. ↗

— George Eliot

#age