Act Of Reading Quotes

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time. ~ Alexander Theroux

I cannot say why, but the simple act of reading it aloud allows you to let go of it. Do not forget this. Believe me, it helps. At first it is a very scary thing to do. ~ Natalie Goldberg

To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it. ~ Alejandro Zambra

Hrough the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you. ~ Ted Chiang

The point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves. ~ Alberto Manguel

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The act of reading outside of your experience increases empathy. It broadens our understanding of humanity and our ideas about who we are and about what we can be. ~ Jesmyn Ward

Here's the thing: the act of reading changes your life, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small ways, but every book you read asks you to move outside of yourself and your own experience to consider the lives of others. So I can't identify a particular book that altered my life, but I do know that the act of reading has pushed me to engage more deeply with the world (real and imagined), and I'm grateful for that. ~ Ethan Rutherford

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained. ~ Toni Morrison

And I knew the simple act of reading would give my mind a certain sort of peace nothing else could. ~ Glynnis MacNicol

On evenings, I spent the entire study period reading....
From that time on, the world began to broaden around me, beyond any tangible limits.
The world, as portrayed in those works destined for young people, was divided in two: an ordinary, everyday world, brutal and unresponding to desires, and a spacious, logical world, about all kind, interesting and desirable.
Wasn't the very act of reading a pleasure more substantial than that of playing or eating, for instance, even when one was starved? ~ Joseph Zobel

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. ~ Alberto Manguel

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,.. ~ Stanley Fish

Coleridge wrote a poem called 'The Eolian Harp,' in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I've read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book's writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else's writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else's structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of 'jewelled' quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass… ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there's some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace. You must take steps to ensure your privacy. ~ Tom Robbins

It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being. ~ Pam Brown

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to. ~ Keith Miller

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways ... It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being. ~ John Connolly

The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. ~ Alberto Manguel

Running a marathon is just like reading a good book. After a while you're just not conscious of the physical act of reading. ~ Frank Shorter

I was maybe 19 years old. And I always remember that it was a great feeling of happiness. Because of that, I said to Myles that it's no different for me if I am read­ing poetry or if I am reading Marx. I try to get the beauty in the very act of reading, you see. This is for me something that many times teachers don't try to do. ~ Paulo Freire

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual. ~ Guy Davenport

For students of every ability and background, it is the simply miraculous act of reading a good book that turns them into readers. The job of adults who care about reading is to move heaven and earth to put that book into a child's hands. ~ Nancy Atwell

When I write poetry, I'll write it down, or a tiny bit of it, and then have to depend on the reader to bring his own feelings, moods and memories to the act of reading poetry. And this act is considerable art in itself. To read poetry or literature with attention is a marvelous thing to be able to do - to respond, to live and be moved by this subtle world you've created about you. ~ William Anderson

In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading itself. Following the line of something - not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend ... ~ Nuala O'Faolain

Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like Penelope by moving our mind back and forth, forth and back, reweaving what's unwoven, undoing what's been done; and language, which regularly returns us to its origin, which starts us off again on the same journey, older, altered, Columbus one more time, but better prepared each later voyage, knowing a bit more, ready for more, equal to a greater range of tasks, calmer, confident - after all, we've come this way before, have habits that help, and a favoring wind - language like that is the language which takes us inside, inside the sentence - inside - inside the mind - inside - inside, where meanings meet and are modified, reviewed and revised, where no perception, no need, no feeling or thought need be scanted or shunted aside. ~ William H Gass

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. ~ Bell Hooks

Literature is essentially loneliness. It is written in solitude, it is read in solitude and, in spite of everything, the act of reading allows a communication between two human beings. ~ Paul Auster

More than the painting you see or the music you hear, the words you read become in the very act of reading them part of who you are, especially if they are the words of exceptionally promising writers. If there is poison in the words, you are poisoned; if there is nourishment, you are nourished; if there is beauty, you are made a little more beautiful. In Hebrew, the word dabar means both word and also deed. A word doesn't merely say something, it does something. It brings something into being. ~ Frederick Buechner

A few months ago, I was sitting morosely at my desk, wondering why I had ever agreed to review Barbara Bush: A Memoir for an English newspaper. The experience was proving to be a degradation of the act of reading. Imagine, if you will, being strapped into a chair and made to listen to Liberace playing the piano for hour upon hour. Or imagine being fed chocolate dinner mints, like a hapless goose, until you are on the verge of explosion. Such was my lot. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The act of reading is so intimate that readers are unpredictable. ~ Charlie Huston

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer's tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller's breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer's voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies. ~ Ken Liu

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading. ~ Carolyn Mackler

A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes its own interpreter. ~ Margaret Atwood

In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play. ~ Alice McDermott

Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself. ~ Ivan M. Granger

None of the things I have mentioned can make a foolish man wise or a bad book good. But when they are properly used they remind us that the act of reading is an act of confidence, and almost of conspiracy, between one human being and another. That conspiracy can get nowhere, and that confidence can be betrayed. But if all goes well the reader may put down the book at the end and say what the author - and this author is no exception - most wants to hear:'I learned a lot from your book, but what is more to the point is I had a very good time. ~ John Russell

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. ~ Hilary Mantel

I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process. ~ Bell Hooks

Oh Beck, I love reading your e-mail. Learning your life. And I am careful; I always mark new messages unread so that you won't get alarmed. My good fortune doesn't stop there; You prefer e-mail. You don't like texting. So this means that I am not missing out on all that much communication. You wrote an "essay" for some blog in which you stated that "e-mails last forever. You can search for any word at any time and see everything you ever said to anyone about that one word. Texts go away." I love you for wanting a record. I love your records for being so accessible and I'm so full of you, your calendar of caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don't publish, your recipes and exercises. You will know me soon too, I promise. ~ Caroline Kepnes

You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That's all there is to it. ~ Yannick Murphy

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, "Where did I put my keys?" performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved ~ Ian Bogost

I wanted to act when I was young. When I was 12, I asked the head of English at my school, 'Can I audition?' and he said, 'What would we want you for?' And I remember going, 'Oh yeah. Why would they want me?' ~ Alison Moyet

Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: "When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs, goals, defenses, and values," and a reader will "introject meaning that will satisfy his needs and reject meaning that is threatening to his ego. ~ Molly Guptill Manning

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on. ~ Robert Southey

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. ~ Walter Brueggemann

The gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When you know who you are, what you stand for and that all your intentions are forthright, it will not matter what anyone labels you. You walk taller, you act with assurance, you speak with certainty, you carry yourself with dignity, you convey honesty and you embrace all this with humility. Classify that attitude however you like. I know what it really is: giving honor to God by being a reflection of His goodness. Never be ashamed to wear that label proudly. ~ Carlos Wallace

I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned. ~ Daniel Alarcon

In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death. ~ A. Edward Newton

... it is worth remembering that the act of writing has its own magic. ~ Jonathan Oliver

Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you, as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you, as your shadow unshakeable. Sayings of the Buddha ~ Deborah Moggach

Jack Miles's wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it. ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

No one could believe that Rachel Held - once such a promising young evangelist - was losing faith. Their prescriptions rolled in: "God's ways are higher than our ways. You need to stop asking questions and just trust him." "There must be some sin in your life causing you to stumble. If you repent, your doubts will go away." "You need to avoid reading anything besides the Bible. Those books of yours are leading you astray." "You should come to my church." "You should listen to Tim Keller." "You need to check your pride, Rachel, and submit yourself to God. ~ Rachel Held Evans

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there. ~ Wallace Stevens

Many skeptics, it is true, are inclined to dismiss the whole procedure [chart reading] as akin to astrology or necromancy; but the sheer weight of its importance in Wall Street requires that its pretensions be examined with some degree of care. ~ Benjamin Graham

True consistency, that of the prudent and the wise, is to act in conformity with circumstances and not to act always the same way under a change of circumstances. ~ John C. Calhoun

There's just something "off" about equating the act of spending three years writing a book with the act of someone exploiting themselves by drunkenly flashing the camera for "Girls Gone Wild" or something. ~ Marie Calloway

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. ~ Hannah Arendt

All metropolises have one thing in common: they are made up of a crowd of lonely people ~ S.E. Sever

Life is a cycle of the same choices with those lessons already taught. Some people act like they don't know what they are doing until they get caught. Learn from your mistakes and keep it moving never to repeat them. Don't be afraid to close that door. Since repeating a mistake becomes a choice, not a excuse for you anymore. -yl- ~ YackLounge Dj Kas

I'm crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I'm strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything's ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. ~ Toni Morrison

Matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia. ~ Graham Chapman

Waiting for something or somebody for hours, for days and even for years is a common human behavior. Take the word 'waiting' out of your dictionary! Move! Act! These are the words and the behaviors you need! The dead can wait for, but the quick must not! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

Whatever can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? ~ William Stafford

baby lick me. like your mouth has the gift of reading and i'm your favorite book. ~ Rupi Kaur

I often tell my clients they should do at least 30 percent of all their reading outside their own field. This will give them perspective and knowledge that will make them more interesting. ~ Roger Ailes

Are you sure, Gray?'
He lifted his eyes. 'No ... I'm not. I'm not sure of a damn thing.' He slipped his hands free of the monsignor's and peeled the battery off the phone, cutting the last ring in half. 'But that doesn't mean I won't act. ~ James Rollins

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays. ~ Vivien Leigh

There are times in relationships, when we blow it. In spite of our best intentions, we wrong others. Our jealousy makes us feel inferior. Our own wounds cause us to act irrationally. Our insecurities lead us to say hurtful things.
And so, we find ourselves acting out. In short, we cloud our lives with muddy water. We trash around the pond of our emotions until things are just too messed up to figure out how to fix them.
It is in the times of muddy water that we learn how to wait it out. We have to wait until the mud settles. We must wait until we can clearly see where the water of our lives ends and the mud of misplaced emotions begin.
Have the patience to wait until the mud settles. Be still until the water is clear. In clear water, words come. Right actions reveal them selves and healing appears.
From the Devotional A Word in Season ~ Stella Payton

I go to the rail and shout after her as she descends the stairs, "But that Mrs. Shinn called me a whore! In front of everybody!"
She pauses on the middle steps and looks up at me. "Perhaps, Miss Faber, it is because you continually act like one! ~ L.A. Meyer

I wanted to be a dancer my whole life. And when I gave it up to act, I always had a really sad part of myself that missed it and missed performing and missed being physical in that way. ~ Lyndsy Fonseca

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE ~ Mark Twain

The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if it's the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations. ~ Richard Ayoade

The last official act of any government is to loot their own treasury. ~ Glenn Beck

When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act, as if forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the way strings come with a violin. Begin with the basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all. You can never forgive people for things you have forgotten about. You need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did; your memory keeps the pain alive long after the hurt has stopped. Remembering is the storage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the first place. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It's like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat. ~ Alan Moore

Because women tend to turn their anger inward and blame themselves, they tend to become depressed and their self-esteem is lowered. This, in turn, causes them to become more dependent and less willing to risk rejection or abandonment if they were to stand up for themselves by asserting their will, their opinions, or their needs.

Men often defend themselves against hurt by putting up a wall of nonchalant indifference. This appearance of independence often adds to a woman's fear of rejection, causing her to want to reach out to achieve comfort and reconciliation. Giving in, taking the blame, and losing herself more in the relationship seem to be a small price to pay for the acceptance and love of her partner.

As you can see, both extremes anger in and anger out-create potential problems. While neither sex is wrong in the way they deal with their anger, each could benefit from observing how the other sex copes with their anger. Most men, especially abusive ones, could benefit from learning to contain their anger more instead of automatically striking back, and could use the rather female ability to empathise with others and seek diplomatic resolutions to problems. Many women, on the other hand, could benefit from acknowledging their anger and giving themselves permission to act it out in constructive ways instead of automatically talking themselves out of it, blaming themselves, or allowing a man to blame them. Instead of giving in to keep the peace, it w ~ Beverly Engel

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story. ~ Amy Engel

Books are borrowed minds, and because they capture the soul of a people, they explore and celebrate all it means to be human. ~ Diane Ackerman