"I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person who family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. My identity as a person is so entwined with my love of reading and books that I cannot separate the two."
Reading quotes
Reading
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Reading quotes (page 31 of 330)
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"After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition."
"Books had instant replay long before televised sports."
"Nothing worse than reading a love scene written by your father."
"I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic."
"Reading any collection of a man's quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won't go away hungry, but it's not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal."
"Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human."
"If a person is constantly evolving, constantly reading new material and being exposed to new material and growing in life, then you're becoming, hopefully, a more intelligent and well-rounded individual. If you're not then something's wrong and you're sliding back in the other direction."
"I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous."
"My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books."
"A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."
"We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once."
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph"
"That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit."
"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company."
"The court decided, based on its reading of our precedents, that the effects test of Lemon is violated whenever government action creates an identification of the state with a religion, or with religion in general, ...or when the effect of the governmental action is to endorse one religion over another, or to endorse religion in general."
"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others."
"If readers understand that they do not understand what they are reading then they must possess an understanding which is superior to the meaning which caused that misunderstanding."
"A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators."
"Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard."