#reading

There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul! ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#poetry #oppression

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read. ↗

— David McCullough

#life

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much. ↗

— Frances Hodgson Burnett

#reading #biography

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper. ↗

— Polly Horvath

#libraries #reading #summer #self-knowledge

She is too fond of books, and it has addled her brain. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#reading #louisa-may-alcott

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. ↗

— Karen Marie Moning

#reading #love

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#bibliophiles #books #reader #reading #love

Too many books. . . too many fairy tales led him to believe that there was something romantic in being a soldier. ↗

— Elizabeth Nelson

#romantic

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. ↗

— Russell Banks

#american #art #classics #early #early age

Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start. ↗

— John Green

#simile #john-green