#reading

Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish?" Whoever it was, I agree with him. ↗

— A. Edward Newton

#buying-books #infinity #reading #soul #diversity

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#reading #manners

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#literacy #reading #mankind

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable? ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#greed

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually. ↗

— William Ellery Channing

#reading #genius

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#reading #guilt

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#reflection

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust. ↗

— Italo Calvino

#calvino #if #italo #night #on

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#winter #winter

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#reading #blessings