"Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading."
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Reading quotes
Reading
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Reading quotes (page 22 of 330)
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"The wise man reads both books and life itself."
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"Reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet."
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"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."
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"I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China."
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"Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading."
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"If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds."
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"I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle."
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"The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."
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"Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist."
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"I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author."
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"This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum."
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"A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture."
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"For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community."
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"Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win."
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"Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain."
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"If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom."
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"If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading."
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"He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich."
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"The proper study of mankind is books."
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