Reading Apps Quotes

it's going great. Two months in, and I've created three apps."

"Apps?"

"For people who buy my book as an e-book --which will be everybody. The first is called Don't Look. It's for the overly sensitive. It blurs and turns the type red when a dog dies or a baby is born with a birth defect. Stuff like that. My second is It's Not Okay When You Say It, and it delivers an electrical zap if the reader laughs at a racial slur. My third is Jesus Thesaurus, which replaces explicit sexual language with church words. So, when one of my characters 'saints' a guy's 'disciple', He'll beg her to 'cavalry' his 'Baptists' and 'shout amen'. ~ Helen Ellis

AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they're almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn't stealthily dump core in your shoes.) ~ Charles Stross

The best endings never end; they begin ~ Ela Crain

Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books. ~ Holly Black

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.
If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended. ~ Salman Rushdie

Whatever had happened, she wondered, to the concept of reading as entertainment? Now it appeared to be an endurance contest as to how many pages the reader could get through without throwing up.
(Lorinda, chapter 1) ~ Marian Babson

It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me. ~ Lucy Corin

Well, poetry - at least lyric poetry - tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self. But everything we want to do these days is an escape from self. People don't want to sit home and think. They want to sit home and watch television. Or they want to go out and have fun. And having fun is not usually meditative. It doesn't have anything to do with reassessing one's experience and finding out who one is or who the other guy is. It has to do with burning energy. When you go to the movies, you're overcome with special effects and monstrous goings-on. Things unfold with a rapidity that's thrilling. You're not given a second to contemplate the previous scene, to meditate on something that's just happened - something else takes its place.

We seem to want instant gratification. Violent movies give you instant gratification. And drugs give you instant gratification. Sporting events give you instant gratification. Prostitutes give you instant gratification. This is what we seem to like. But that which requires effort, that which reveals itself only in the long term, that which demands some learning, patience, or skill - and reading is a skill - there's not enough time for that, it seems. We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.

SHAWN

Maybe people avoid poetry because it somehow actively makes them nervous or anxious.

STRAND
Mark Strand

I can survive well enough on my own - if given proper reading material. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I'm constantly reading a book with a missing page, and it's always the most important one. ~ Fredrik Backman

Most of the time, we don't know others; we only know our own ideas about others ~ S.E. Sever

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind. ~ Matt Haig

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 ~ Anatole Broyard

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust. ~ Jonathan Franzen

You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them. ~ Philip Pullman

I think I might have something for you today, he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

The secret to speed-reading is moving your lips faster. ~ Charles M. Schulz

You must read to lead. Reading feeds. It opens our souls to a long line of counselors. ~ Dave Harvey

If Death-Cast hit me up last night, they would've knocked me out of that dream I was having where I was losing a marathon to some little kids on tricycles.
If Death-Cast hit me up one week ago, I wouldn't have been up late reading all the notes Aimee wrote me when we were still a thing.
If Death-Cast called two weeks ago, they would've interrupted that argument I was having with Malcolm and Tagoe about how Marvel heroes are better than DC heroes.
If Death-Cast called one month ago, they would've killed the dead silence that came with me not wanting to talk with anyone after Aimee left. ~ Adam Silvera

It is the province of the tarot reader to move backwards, forwards, even sideways in time. ~ Sasha Graham

What I like most about reading is I can read in minutes what it took the author hours to write. What I like most about writing is readers can read in minutes what it took me seconds to write. ~ Jarod Kintz

Seeing the way leadership works in the real world is a tad more enlightening than reading case studies as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. ~ Jeetendr Sehdev

Life is just a series of obstacles preventing you from reading your book. ~ Anonymous

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make? ~ Francesco Petrarca

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I sensed that Confucius is an interesting character. This is someone who lived over 2,500 years ago and is still speaking to us. That people are still reading and repeating what he said so long ago is something I find quite fascinating. ~ Russell Freedman

That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading. ~ Ben Lerner

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I call it treason against rock 'n' roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics ... When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick ... If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. ~ Alice Cooper

I wake up and read although Nietzsche says that's foolish. A sort of narcotic, reading. I read with my hands down the front of my pants - my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books. ~ Kate Zambreno

I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles."
~ Ithana Aaronson ~ Jeanne Birdsall

People are always reading things into the films. ~ Roger Moore

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy ... ~ Laurie Halse Anderson