#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

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#dictators #illiteracy #reading #censorship

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#letters

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve. ↗

— Montesquieu

#stress-relief #trouble #stress

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

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. ↗

— Julie Powell

#reading #ya

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? ↗

— Laura Miller

#children #escapism #fantasy #reading #reality

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books. ↗

— Laura Miller

#books #lit #reading #skepticism

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