Reading Groups Quotes

The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books. ~ Tessa Jowell

A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. ~ Nick Hornby

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead. ~ Ian McEwan

I did not want vocal groups. I was not interested in singing with a group because there's too much problem with groups in the first place. ~ Carl Gardner

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. ~ Eudora Welty

And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I'd read it, when it had seemed as swift and pure as the Winding Arrow, the river that divides Calormen from Archenland. ~ Anne Fadiman

I flip a cognitive coin while reading Dr. Briggs' take on life, theology, science, and the conception of human life. ~ Asa Don Brown

Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread. ~ Henry Stevens

The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead. ~ Stephen Chbosky

We need to reshape the movement as one of grassroots activists, and not 'professional activists' who populate the seemingly endless number of national animal rights groups. For many people, activism has become writing a check to a national group that is very pleased to have you leave it to them. Although it is important to give financial support to worthy efforts only, giving money is not enough and giving to the wrong groups can actually do more harm than good. ~ Gary L. Francione

The perfect Librarian is calm, cool, collected, intelligent, multilingual, a crack shot, a martial artist, an Olympic-level runner (at both the sprint and marathon), a good swimmer, an expert thief, and a genius con artist. They can steal a dozen books from a top-security strongbox in the morning, discuss literature all afternoon, have dinner with the cream of society in the evening, and then stay up until midnight dancing, before stealing some more interesting tomes at three a.m. That's what a perfect Librarian would do. In practice, most Librarians would rather spend their time reading a good book. ~ Genevieve Cogman

I don´t think I love very many things
but here are the ones I can think of:

I love the first sip
of coffee in the morning

I love reading someone else´s words
and finding a connection in them

I love the feeling a good song invokes

I love wondering

I love driving at night
with no destination

I love the gentle kind of sadness
like a reminder that I can feel. ~ Marianna Paige

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing can be gained by extensive study and wide reading. Give them up immediately. ~ Dogen

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias - why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there's a primitive instinct to defend one's turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group's leader "does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion."
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, "the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk." In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. "Terrorists are made, not born," Sunstein observed, "and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts. ~ Michiko Kakutani

The only big drawback to writing is its negative impact on reading. ~ Michael Kroft

Reading a good book is an escape to an alternative life, writing a good book is the closest thing to actually living that life. ~ Chas Scott

There is that difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading a description of being kicked in the teeth. Some call it existential. ~ Gita Mehta

Teach your children well, so they don't live in off-campus group houses and throw loud parties while I'm trying to sleep. ~ Graham Nash

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn't make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel. ~ Jackson Pearce

Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do."

So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how. ~ Alan Jacobs

I took group lessons at a rink near my home. We first had to learn how to stand up on the ice wearing skates. Eventually we learned to move forward, but soon found out that it was not that easy to stop! So that was our next important lesson. ~ Nancy Kerrigan

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The greatest hurdle one must overcome along the journey from peasantry to nobility is a commitment to reading and reflection. For nothing distinguishes the nobleman from the peasant more than knowledge and understanding.
Vicar Sayeedi - Author ~ Vicar Sayeedi

The only thing secretive about secret societies is the fear that the arrogant inside these groups have of sharing the little they know, because they often don't even understand their own books and struggle with little. Their real fear is that someone may come along, understand everything better and faster than they do and before they can, and then, by default, lead them to exclusion by ignorance. On the other hand, their fear blinds them from knowing more and identifying those who can take them to a higher level, the same individuals that they clame to be waiting for and that only appear every couple of hundred years or thousand. This paradox is what leads their groups to extinction by self-imposed destructive behavior or to practices that are in complete contradiction towards what their founder or founders intended. As a matter of fact, the more this reality manifests before our eyes, the easier it is to find quotes in books written by founders of such groups in complete contradiction with what you hear everyone inside these groups speaking. What I'm really saying here is that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, and many other groups out there, have long lost their entitlement to ownership of their own name, and as much as Christianity is today more in tune to an evil God than a benevolent one. Their real intention, even if manifested mostly at a subconscious level, is to keep away anyone that contradicts what they want to see, rather than what they should be seeing. I ~ Robin Sacredfire

I consider myself a perpetual student. You seek and learn every day: from an experiment in the lab, from reading a scientific journal, from taking care of a patient. Because of this, I rarely get bored. ~ Anthony Fauci

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading only a bit of a great book (e.g., Plato's Republic) is like getting engaged but never marrying. The initial experience is pleasurable but can become frustrating if prolonged. ~ John Reynolds

If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit. ~ Terry Pratchett

They say she was once a grand lady and lived on the hill. But she took to reading books and went from bad to worse. Stuffed her head full of ideas, and now she's a bit addled. ~ Helen Deutsch

He [Jesus] was the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I've ever encountered in my life or in my reading. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world ... ~ Charles Templeton

The bath is one of the places I prefer, certainly not a place I leave readily, a place where one can close the door and remove oneself, put oneself in parentheses, as it were, from the rest of humanity. It is a place for reading and thinking, where one's mind wanders easily, where time seems temporarily suspended. ~ Sheila Kohler

I'm not good at reading reviews and things like that. ~ Mary Elizabeth Ellis

The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Just as with swimming or riding a bike, you can't really learn how to fall in love from reading a book not even this one. Sure you can read about the different swimming strokes or the parts of a bicycle; you can learn the theory and physics behind the sport. But to get to the heart of the matter you've got to leap in and learn by doing. ~ Nicholas Boothman

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own. ~ Pamela Sargent

It's honestly a wonder that writing groups produce writers at all, instead of walking insecurities raised entirely in echo chambers of bad advice. ~ Brandon Sanderson

He was always teasing me about not reading books, but one day he said: Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand. ~ Glen Duncan

I was just reading about Paul Simon in 'Uncut', and it was fascinating. I never think about him much or think about his music or anything, but it's interesting to hear his ideas on stuff. ~ J Mascis

The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. ~ Alister E. McGrath

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.
Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.
But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. ~ Richard Flanagan

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well. ~ Brian Kernighan

And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them. He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother's ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father's temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague. ~ Michael Chabon

The concern of the scholar is primarily with what the text meant; the concern of the layperson is usually with what it means. The believing scholar insists that we must have both. Reading the Bible with an eye only to its meaning for us can lead to a great deal of nonsense as well as to every imaginable kind of error - because it lacks controls. Fortunately, most believers are blessed with at least a measure of that most important of all hermeneutical skills - common sense. ~ Gordon D. Fee

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable. ~ Virginia Woolf

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right. ~ Truman Capote

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall ...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry. ~ Machado De Assis

It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones.
It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break
these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward? ~ Laurie Halse Anderson