#reading

Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. ↗

— Michel De Certeau

#writing #age

For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world. ↗

— David L. Ulin

#reading #age

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops. ↗

— Geoff Ryman

#aging #books #old-age #reading #writing

Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. ↗

— Alan Jacobs

#reading #age

Books whose topics I thoroughy depsise are accapteble because they often force the reader to think and to examine his own beliefs. In an age where most people are either blindly obedient or radical, exposing oneself to the ideas contained in even the most controversial of books is a good thing. ↗

— Tiffini Johnson

#knowledge #reading #reading-books #age

Are your friends as good as MY friends? I can discern the nod of of assent but doubt it. My own friends are far better, they are famous people and they are all dead. Who, you may ask, are those friends of mine, and why are they dead? It is a fair question. They are dead because, had they lived, they would have died anyway from extreme old age and decrepitude. ↗

— Flann O'Brien

#age

Find a quiet place, and just read. If you’re reading an ebook, clear away everything else but your ebook reader. Then you settle into the reading, and enjoy it. Bask in the luxury of reading without distractions. ↗

— Leo Babauta

#age

Writing is defined as "a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. ↗

— Neil Postman

#writing #age

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#reading #age

Hope knew that her thinking regarding books went contrary to the general sentiment of the people of Eden. Books were seen as a waste of time. What was the point, unless you were reading for information? To lose oneself in a book was to be slightly wacky, a little greedy, and ultimately slothful. There was no value. You couldn't make money from reading a book. A book did not give you clean bathrooms and waxed floors. It did not put the garden in. You couldn't have a conversation while reading. It was arrogant and alienated others. In short, those who read were wasteful and haughty and incapable of living in the real world. They were dreamers. ↗

— David Bergen

#readers-and-reading #reading #age