Monday, May 04, 2009

ON READING 1

*



Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointment of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate.... Montesquieu.





*


Books are as important as friends, and may be more so. Because all of us are living in very limited circles, books enable us to runaway from them...Shimon Peres.





*


Reading makes immigrants of us all.... Anna Quindlen.





*


My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.... Lincoln.





*


Socrates thought books are a waste of time, since they remind " one of what one already knows."..... Anna Quindlen.





*


The eye witnesses die; written word lives for ever.... Anna Quindlen





*


The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.





*


Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff the stuff that isn't so too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union.... Edward Albee.





*


Reading begets rereading, and rereading begets writing.... Alberto Manguel





*


There are only two ways really to become a writer. One is write. The other is to read....Anna Quindlen.





*


I have sometimes dreamt when the Day of judgment dawns and great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will run to Peter and will say, not without certain envy, when he sees us coming with our books under our arms,






" Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."


Virginia Woolf.





*


Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself....John Milton.






*


Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested...Francis Bacon.










*







What we read enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness, and love and wisdom....Eugene H. Peterson.















*







Researchers in Britain asked 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men. men preferred novels written by men, often revolving around loneliness and alienation. Camus- " The Stranger ", Salinger, " Catcher in the Rye ", Vonnegut's " slaughter House Five ".







The women leaned towards books written by women. The women's books described relationships and a lot better than the books the men chose, " jane Eyre ", " Wuthering Heights ", " The Hand Maid's Tale ", " Middlemarch", " Pride and Prejudice " and " Beloved "






*


Harper lee to Oprah:



" And Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Kerenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kutz, somethings should happen in soft pages, not cold metal."






*



Books transport us to other places, give us face time with unforgettable characters, lay bare our deep desires.
*








Refrain from reading such notions as "fictive", " fabricated" and " untrue to life" into the word " novelistic ". Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion...Milan Kundera.






*



book in hand the same significance as an elegant cane for a dandy centuries ago. It differentiates you from others.






*


A good book ( like movie, poetry, music ) should make us think no longer the person when we began.















*







A book is a portable world no one can take away from you....Azar Nafisi.















*







Ignorance is not bliss.... Azar Nafisi















*







I read literature slowly, digging for the hidden..eager to envision what is there, noticing what is not... Tony Morrison.















*







The important thing is to keep the book in your mind, not on your property... Steve Almond.















*







What good reading without memory?















*







Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man...Francis Bacon















*







The difference between fiction and reality is fiction has to make sense.















*







Readers regularly abandon books around page 60, vowing to get back to them later.















*







Like any addiction, the insatiable desire to start new books provides immense pleasure... Joe Queenan.















*







I cannot live without books.... Thomas Jefferson.















*







Literature is my Utopia, the story of my life....Helen Keller















*







Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body....Richard Steele















*







A classic- something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read...Mark Twain.















*







Reading allows you to travel in time and space.















*







Whenever I begin rading a new book I am embarking on a new enchanted journey with an unmarked destination... Nancy Pearl















*







I never know where a purticular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led...Nancy Pearl.















*







Some books let me know from the vey first sentence that I am in great hands, that this reading experience will offer me pure pleasure. Nancy Pearl















*







One of my strongest - held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that they are not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is... Nancy Pearl.













*






" .. and when I find 0ne that is all-out emotionally assaultive, I grab the baby and hold on tight....something that comes to me full - bore like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky... Stephen King.













*






I have traveled the world twice. Met the famous, saints and sinners. I've been where no one's been before. Learnt secrets from writers and books all with one library ticket - to the wonderful world of books....Janice James.











*





The only advise, indeed, that one person can give another abour reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. Virginia Woolf.





The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear ? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have none. Virginia Woolf.





Nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal. Virginia Woolf.





We can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers.





You read for the " remote feeling of company" - the sense of being at once together and alone"


Kay Ryan.



By Nancy Pearl in " Book Lust "

One of my strongest- held beliefs is that no one should ever finish a book that they're not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is. Believe me, nobobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren't enjoying but think they ought to read. I live by what I call " the rule of fifty ", which acknowledges that time is short and the world of books is immense. If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over fifty which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding. Keep in mind that your mood has a lot to do with whether or not you will like a book. I always leave open the option of going back to a book that I haven't liked ( especially if some one i respect has recommended it to me ) sometime later. I've begun many books, put them down unfinished, then returned a month or two, or years later and ended up loving them. This happened with Mathew Kneale's " English Passengers ", John Crowley's " Little Big " and Andrea Barrett's " The voyage of the Narwhal "

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home