Reading Thinking Quotes

People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything. ~ Suzy Kassem

I was in a store in Halifax, Nova Scotia that I love, sort of like an environmental friendly sort of store. But they had a great book section. So I went in there all the time. The woman who worked there - which I feel so bad; I've forgotten her name - she handed me the book and she said, "Hey, you should read this. I think it would make a good movie." I remember reading the back of it and I was like, "Huh." Then I just devoured the book and I was so moved by it and said, "Why don't we start developing this into a film?" So that's how it [Into the Forest] all started. ~ Ellen Page

Because of the way we let the actors improvise, it feels like you're watching people react rather than actors reading lines - so I think that's always going to be something I like. ~ Oren Peli

I read, I think, I play, I work. And all that thinkingand playing and reading comes into my art. I couldn't really sithere and delineate for you what the thought process is. I can perhapssay that literature, psychoanalysis and theater have been very valuableexperiences that have informed and nourished me along the way. ~ Harvey Keitel

It has never been easier to get books but never harder to find the quiet needed to study them. ~ John Mark Reynolds

Some people just need to read and think, to spend time alone sorting through the stories in their heads ~ Ronald T. Potter-Efron

Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can't think for themselves - But when one has made up one's opinions, there is no use in reading. ~ Maria Edgeworth

Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did - they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn't have your own. ~ Simone St. James

That when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer) ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I've been reading [Nikita] Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself - but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty. ~ John Lennon

Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading. ~ Ramakrishna

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. ~ Billy Collins

Learning is not automatic. You do not automatically know how to read because you turn five. Most of us are sensitive to the fact that we still have something to learn at every step of the way. Learning is not automatic. It comes with seeking and searching, with reading and watching, with thinking, praying, and listening. ~ Marion D. Hanks

To live fully your well-read life -at any age- it is essential to take your selection of books seriously. When you drift from book to book, you're lulled into thinking that this lack of focus is right and natural - but it's as wrong as can be. Some serendipity in your reading is delightful, but if you wanted to build a house, would you wait for the materials to assemble themselves? - Steve Leveen ~ Pat Williams

Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read. ~ Lemony Snicket

I actually don't have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared. And when you really think about it, all I did wrong was that I took too much stuff, which is the most common backpacker mistake. The part that I wasn't prepared for is the part you can't prepare for. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me. ~ Lebbeus Woods

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. ~ Philip Larkin

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds. ~ James Russell Lowell

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare. ~ Harriet Martineau

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. ~ Thom Gunn

Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void. ~ Aaron Swartz

On top of whatever else I'm doing, I'm usually teaching some form of composition. The benefit of this is I get to read across disciplines. Often enough that work spills over to my creative reading/thinking, and I reach a point of saturation where I can't distinguish between texts and writers and everything starts to blur and smudge together. ~ Gregory Pardlo

I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read. ~ George Brandis

At the risk of appearing predictable, the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking. I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by it. I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement. ~ Hillary Clinton

I think the part I enjoy most is reading the scripts and screening films because I'm a bookworm and a movie buff. ~ Rebecca Eaton

I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something. ~ Isabel Allende

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing
to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. ~ John Haines

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads. ~ Robert Southey

When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key. ~ Joan Baez

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading. ~ Billy Collins

I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing. ~ Derrick Jensen

It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little. ~ Denis Parsons Burkitt

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us. ~ Julia Alvarez

Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write. ~ Penelope Lively

I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be. ~ Jon Bernthal

Normal, ordinary people do not think like a Serial Killer. They have no conception of what is going on in a killer's mind, how he operates. They don't read, which is rightfully so. If they have a life to live, they're not going to spend a lot of time reading up on killers if that's not in their interest. Certainly, Serial Killers and killers have the advantage in that they use the element of surprise ... uh ... darkness, and such things as this ... ~ Richard Ramirez

Sanity and enlightenment ... I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option. ~ Brad Warner

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future business career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training. ~ Alice Foote MacDougall

I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being ~ LeVar Burton

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it. ~ James Laughlin

When the President picks someone who is his ideological soul mate, that's his right, in my reading of "advise and consent." I do think, though, the more you get up the ladder, when someone is no longer accountable to the President, and more importantly, will stay in office after the President, the standard gets tougher and tougher. ~ Russ Feingold

I think it works if there's something online that is not in the show, or in a newspaper, if there's some added value to it - reading a newspaper on line, sometimes you can get video, which you can't get from reading a newspaper. ~ Edward Allen Bernero

The joy of reading can take you so many different places. In addition to intelligence and stretching your mind, I just think reading is so crucial in terms of being a well-rounded person. ~ Gayle King

I am always reading or thinking about reading. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned' ... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative ... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International. ~ Geoffrey K. Pullum

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading. ~ Dwight Yoakam

I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays. ~ Richard Meale

When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think. ~ Charles Lamb

You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that. ~ Bill Gates

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them. ~ Roger Penrose

When you're reading the news and sometimes you just think, "How bad can things get"? ~ John Gallagher, Jr.

Don't underestimate the value people place on authenticity. Politicians listen to the focus groups and say the things they think people want to hear. But after 30 years of reading consumers, I know that they can smell phonies. ~ Rochelle B Lazarus

I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising ... I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often there is a lot of gray area that can be hard to navigate. ~ Lorde

Ultimately I think the difference between reading the Bible and studying it is making the connections between who Jesus is and what he's done. ~ Mark Driscoll

Christians think a long record of church attendence and Bible reading is equivalent to an advanced degree in science. ~ Graham Kendall

I never tell students they cannot read a book they pick up, but I do guide them toward books that I think would be a good fit for them. I think of myself as a reading mentor-a reader who can help them find books they might like. ~ Donalyn Miller

I had been reading about [John] Calvin for years and had been studying the English Renaissance for many more years, and it had never occurred to me to think of them together. I learned that Calvin was the most widely read writer in England in Shakespeare's lifetime. He was translated and published in many editions. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me. ~ Tom Robbins

I'd say the purest experience for the movie is not to have read the book because I think when you've read the book you're just ticking off boxes. I think that after you see the movie, reading the book is a cool thing. I always say the movie's not meant to replace the book. That's ridiculous. I'm a huge fan of the book. ~ Zack Snyder

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read. ~ Susie Bright

People have a hard time reading my comics. I think I leave things out, but I feel you should. ~ Brian Chippendale

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. ~ Lorin Stein

I think it's a really good idea to be bumping into all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. So you make art with strangers. You give a reading. You move somewhere new and try to build a life. You grapple with humanity. ~ Laurel Nakadate

I think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading - it can have very little to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in that respect. ~ David Sylvian

The first time I did a reading/signing thing at Cody's, the woman who did the introduction said something like that, and I wasn't the only one cringing. I remember looking out into the audience and seeing people's faces and people whispering to each other, and thinking like "Ugh, can we just cancel the whole thing? I can't go out there after she said that." ~ Adrian Tomine

I think what has happened to our basketball team, we've been badly distracted. They're not reading too many positive things in the paper. ~ Bill Russell

I'm more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I've found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I've felt, especially at first, when we'd put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together. ~ Lorin Stein

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think. ~ Pearl S. Buck

I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak - it's all there. ~ Jay Baruchel

The trick is to get people to read anything, to engender the love of reading. Once you can read, you can teach yourself anything. Librarians are key, I think. They hold the power to empower. ~ Jane Cleland

I remember the beginnings of the Kurzweil reading machine. I was one of the first to meet Ray Kurzweil and purchase the reading machine in Boston. To think that the machine was at least two and a half large suitcases at the time, and now you have a camera and it takes a picture and you have sound. ~ Stevie Wonder

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better
Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos
so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms. ~ Tana French

Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it. ~ Salman Rushdie

We must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think. ~ Louis L'Amour

Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing. ~ Doris Lessing

I think smart aggregation is a service to readers. And we do it, too ... Whether it's a politics page and you want Dan Balz to tell you what is he reading, what does he think are the smartest articles today on the elections or the primaries. So, I think aggregation is great ... So I'm all for aggregation. And the more eyeballs we can get to our content, the better. We do want readers to be educated and to understand the difference between, what is a source that you can trust as opposed to just rumors out there. And the difference between just repurposing content and not crediting it. ~ Katharine Weymouth

Books can teach you many nice comebacks. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not. ~ Robert Henri

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. I think biographies are very urgent to children. ~ Joan Didion

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good. ~ Robert Dessaix

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Keep on reading, thinking, doing and writing!
Words keep introducing their friends to you. ~ Toba Beta

It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa. ~ Zoe Kazan

The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I think reading the novels definitely was a good source for me to study from. ~ Laura Vandervoort

I'm not entirely sure what a historical novel absolutely has to be, but you don't want a reader who loves a very traditional historical novel to go in with the expectation that this is going to deliver the same kind of reading experience. I think what's contemporary about my book has something to do with how condensed things are. ~ Danielle Dutton

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading. ~ John Zorn

When I am working on a painting, everything that I am thinking about at the time be it current events, the books I am reading, personal events, influences, emotions, etc. all find their way into my work. ~ Ali Banisadr

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. ~ John Locke

When we want a book exactly like the one we just finished reading, what we really want is to recreate that pleasurable experience
the headlong rush to the last page, the falling into a character's life, the deeper understanding we've gotten of a place or a time, or the feeling of reading words that are put together in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. We need to start thinking about what it is about a book that draws us in, rather than what the book is about. ~ Nancy Pearl

So many times, I will have people tell me what I did when I was younger. There's so much being written [about] the early Beatles period, and even pre-Beatles period. And people will say, "Oh, he did that because that, and that happened because of that." And I'll be reading and think, "Well, that didn't happen" and, "That's not why I did that." Like anyone's history, you remember what went down better than people who weren't there. ~ Paul McCartney

There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures. ~ Chris Ware

Sometimes I do readings and people can't stop laughing, but I'm reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It's despair - just keep laughing, until you are dead. ~ Alina Bronsky

People are more interested in reading bombastic ideas, whether they're positive or negative. Part of me has sort of lost interest in doing criticism because of that. I've always realized that criticism is basically autobiography. Obviously in my criticism, it's very clear that it's autobiography, but I think it's that way for everybody. ~ Chuck Klosterman