#reading

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head. ↗

— Paul Auster

#choice #comfort #comsolation #escape #pleasure

…and soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#reading #stories #beauty

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#beauty

If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read. ↗

— Tony Reinke

#reading #beauty

an incredibly beautiful read ↗

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer

#beauty

To be original is not creating your own idea; it's the essence of the idea in the reader's mind. ↗

— Kaela Marooney

#essence #inspirational #original #reading #writing

The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear. ↗

— James Lane Allen

#reading #music

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. ↗

— Atwood H. Townsend

#study #willful-ignorance #business

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? ↗

— James Salter

#literature #reading #words #change

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#integrity #isolation #reading #self-knowledge #social-change