#reading

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. ↗

— Malcolm X

#reading #change

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#change

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. ↗

— Stephen R. Covey

#mind #reading #change

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#change

ان الناس لاتعرف ان كتابا واحدا كفيل بان يغير مجرى حياة الانسان. ↗

— Malcolm X

#change #malcolm-x #reading #wisdom #change

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime. ↗

— Verlyn Klinkenborg

#library #reading #change

But when your heart is tired and dumb, your soul has need of ease, There’s none like the quiet folk who wait in libraries– The counselors who never change, the friends who never go, The old books, the dear books that understand and know! ↗

— Margaret Widdemer

#reading #change

This was the book I read over and over. I really felt so in tune with them- I knew all the dates of their lives, what they had been doing, whre they had been. They were always my heroes, creating something fantastic against all odds, and against their real life. ↗

— Christian Tetzlaff

#reading #dating

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#death

I won't be sad too often, If they bury me in the library With bookworms in my coffin. ↗

— J. Patrick Lewis

#death #library #reading #death