Reading Quotes - Page 11

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me-I have no others.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know - the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see... I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.

If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what’s more is, you can take others with you!

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.