#reading

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading #feeling

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#english #literature #reading #teachers #beauty

That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#reading #dreams

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. ↗

— Walter Moers

#reading #dreams

I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. ↗

— Amy Plum

#die-for-me #escape #kate #loneliness #reading

Never stop dreaming or reading. ↗

— A.B. Shepherd

#hope #inspiration #life #life-and-living #reading

I was raised to respect books - the house was full of them. From the time I was little, it was drummed into our heads that books were almost the most important thing in the world, second only to getting a good education. ↗

— Martha Southgate

#reading #education

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still living the book. ↗

— Daniel Pennac

#literature #reading #intimacy

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. ↗

— Giorgos Seferis

#been #digested #i #influenced #lambs

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself. ↗

— Elisabeth Shue

#because #came #class #curious #enjoying