Obsessed With Reading Quotes

My partner doesn't read. He's not illiterate - he just chooses not to read - and I love reading. I'm obsessed with reading. ~ Evangeline Lilly

I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading ... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. ~ Junot Diaz

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism. ~ Iggy Pop

Idly, I flipped through the ledger's pages, for I cannot resist a book set before me no matter its kind. Writing draws my eye; I am impelled as by sorcery to read even if it is an accountant's list or a solicitor's instructions or, as here, nothing more than a record of travelers who have passed through this inn. ~ Kate Elliot

I suspected learning a language would be both useful and enjoyable (I love memorising lists of things), and would get rid of the embarrassment of being monolingual at 21. I'd been obsessed with reading for as long as I could remember, the only thing I'd ever thought I might want to be was a writer, but I was much better at crafting sentences than at stringing plots together. ~ Deborah Smith

Next to praying there is nothing so important in practical religion as Bible reading. By reading that book we may learn what to believe, what to be, and what to do; how to live with comfort, and how to die in peace.
Happy is that man who possesses a Bible! Happier still is he who reads it! Happiest of all is he who not only reads it, but obeys it, and makes it the rule of his faith and practice! ~ J.C. Ryle

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. ~ Lin Yutang

Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film. ~ Jeremy Sisto

As a person, [Barbara Stanwyck] was a great deal like the character she played in Ball of Fire, a stripper called Sugarpuss O'Shea. She had a wonderful, free, open quality in that picture, and that's what she was like as a woman. Reclusive by nature, she was happy to just stay home, but she read everything. She got me reading books as a way of life and, if I asked her, would help me out with my acting. We only had one scene together in Titanic - I played her daughter's boyfriend! - so there was a limit to what I could learn by working with her. She taught me what to do with my hands, how to get over my self-consciousness, and how to lower my voice, which I thought was still too high. And she taught me to be decisive with things like entrances. "When you walk in," she told me, "be sure you're standing up straight. Walk in with confidence." She didn't want me to sidle into a scene as if I were ashamed to be in the movie. Make the entrance! Take the scene! But I wasn't going there for acting tutorials. ~ Robert J. Wagner

Our society is so obsessed with working out to be skinny, and none of that has a purpose. I love that my daughter sees me running because she knows I have a race and that I want to be faster. It becomes much less of a grind when it's that way. ~ Megyn Price

Lewis was a scholar and deeply spiritual man, so it is no surprise that all his characters have to face the complex nature of of the human condition. As a young boy, Lewis suffered from terrible nightmares...Reading fantasy helped Lewis deal with the fears that plagued him in real life. He believed that fantasy makes it easier for children to cope with their fears. In an essay in support of fantasy literature for children, he wrote, "Since it is so likely they will meet cruel enemies{in real life], let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker." By writing about serious themes like distrust, pride, temptation, and greed in a fantastical environment , Lewis helps readers recognize these emotions and forces in their own lives. ~ E.J. Kirk

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as "confessional." She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic's courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…

I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don't know how or why yet. ~ Kate Zambreno

reading is dreaming but with your eyes open ~ Tanisha Jhaveri

I'm never sure who I'm writing for, or who's reading me, but I definitely see myself in conspiracy with my readers. ~ Carol Anshaw

I am convinced there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds. ~ Carl Sagan

When in Rome, Alexander," said Magnus, "one drives a Maserati."
They had to get to Rome as fast as possible, and they couldn't use a Portal, so Magnus said he was selecting the next best option. Shinyun was reading the Red Scrolls of Magic and ignoring them both, which was fine with Alec.
"An excellent choice," said the attendant at teh luxury car rental lot. "Gotta love a classic 3500 GT Spyder."
Alec leaned into Magnus. "The car is also a spider?"
Magnus shrugged, flashing Alec an irresistibly bright smile. "No idea. I just picked it because it was Italian and red. ~ Cassandra Clare

Cat people, you see, don't just have cats; they're somewhere between somewhat and fully obsessed with those cats. You can identify cat people sometimes by the fact that their friends can't help but know the names of their cats for the simple reason that cat people are always telling stories about these cats. ~ Anna David

Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Islam invaded Europe twice from the Mediterranean - first in Iberia, the second time in southeastern Europe, as well as nibbling at Sicily and elsewhere. Christianity invaded Islam multiple times, the first time in the Crusades and in the battle to expel the Muslims from Iberia. Then it forced the Turks back from central Europe. The Christians finally crossed the Mediterranean in the 19th century, taking control of large parts of North Africa. Each of these two religions wanted to dominate the other. Each seemed close to its goal. Neither was successful. What remains true is that Islam and Christianity were obsessed with each other from the first encounter. Like Rome and Egypt they traded with each other and made war on each other. ~ George Friedman

Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.

Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life. ~ Arlaina Tibensky

The author extols the power of having significant portions of God's Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative. ~ N. T. Wright

Nothing will help us grow spiritually more than spending time alone with God every day, reading His Word and praying. Time alone with God is essential to our spiritual welfare. ~ Billy Graham

I am so inspired by the people watching my videos and responding to them. I have learned so much from my community over the years and always love reading their feedback and their own personal stories that they share with me. ~ Michelle Phan

When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.
Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous. ~ Martin Walser

I have taken much pains to know everything that is esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my reading, nothing now remains to comfort me at the close of this life but this passage of St. Paul: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." To this I cleave, and herein do I find rest. ~ John Selden

You weasel, good-for-nothing, scumbag, swine,
sleazebag, scumbucket, scoundrel, son-of-a-bitch!"
In the midst of everything, we all looked at Rosina,
who smiled sheepishly.
"Sorry. I was reading the Dictionary the other day."
I stared at her with incomprehension. ~ Kelly Batten

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.
This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. ~ Mark Haddon

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms. ~ Victor Villanueva

In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see. ~ C.S. Lewis

I found working in the lab is so completely different than reading a textbook about it. You know, you're planning strategies; you're working with your own hands. There's essential satisfaction in running experiments. ~ Eric Kandel

Suddenly the reader's eyes were filled with tears, and a loving voice whispered in his ear: -Why are you crying if everything in that book isn't true?- And the reader replied: -I know; but what I feel is real. ~ Angel Gonzalez

When I was with him, I felt like a book worth reading all the way through again and again and again. Sure, he liked my cover. I wanted him to, but I wanted him to like everything else too. I imagined him buying the book, studying it, quoting it, memorizing his favorite parts. He'd keep it with him always, like a Bible, hold it sacred even when the cover fell off and the book became bent with age and use. Maybe, he'd be buried with it. That's all I wanted. ~ Candice Raquel Lee

Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics
reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world. ~ Edith Pearlman

few people in the streets he's passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses - they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep. ~ Stephen King

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

I read Greek myths. I read about far off places, Venice and Paris. I read about men who searched for things they could not find at home, and women who fell in love with the wrong person and waited for the arrival of their beloved for so long that a year was no different from a single day. The same thing was happening to me. Years were passing. I was already a woman, and I still wasn't done reading. ~ Alice Hoffman

Reading is how we learn to attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world: reading inhabits us with the tendrils of love. ~ Rick Gekoski

The llluminati Reptilian-hybrids are terrified of unpredictable people and situations and they are obsessed with controlling all sides to control the outcome. We see this in the way the global economy is controlled, not even by open competition in what we call 'capitalism', but by 'cartelism'. The market is rigged to ensure the desired outcome. ~ David Icke

Renewal of mind begins with mediation on the word of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My dad is into movies, and they let me watch movies. I was obsessed with Monty Python when I was in preschool - I don't know why. ~ Charlie Tahan

Because we are urban dwellers we are obsessed with human problems. We are so alienated from the world of nature that few of us can name the wild flowers and insects of our locality or notice the rapidity of their extinction. ~ James E. Lovelock

I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw 'Doctor Zhivago' every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater. ~ John Hughes