Reading Literature Quotes
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story
I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
It is the spirit of the poets that gives the soldiers strength to fight.
Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.
Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.
Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.
Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times.
So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.
Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing
To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.
Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.
We encounter great souls, who lived in historical times, in ancient books.
I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.
What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.
