Quotation About Reading III

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering
a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills.
Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle
or the intricacies of close order drill "by the numbers,"
recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound
by sound and word by word.
~ Jacquelyn Gross


It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different
dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different
books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food
in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
~ Sydney Smith


Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Richard Steele


Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading. ~ Laurence Sterne


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~ Alvin Toffler


If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal "blocks" or "bites" of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that
the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental "picture" and entertainment -- not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words
in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant. ~ Wade E. Cutler


Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready,
and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. ~ E. M. Forster


Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West


The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one
on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read. ~ Benjamin Franklin


Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ~ Virginia Woolf


Choose an author as you choose a friend. ~ Sir Christopher Wren


When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day. ~ Jean Fritz


I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. ~ Anne Tyler


No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. ~ Atwood H. Townsend


Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

Quotation About Reading II

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard


Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. ~ Augustine Birrell


Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers. ~ Steven Spielberg


People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith


When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.
If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. ~ Maya Angelou


Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. ~ William Faulkner


When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger


It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Lord Henry P. Brougham


There is creative reading as well as creative writing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. ~ Emilie Buchwald


To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ~ Edmund Burke


Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading. ~ Rufus Choate


Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers. ~ William Cobbett


You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff. ~ Jim Critchfield


Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~ Albert Einstein



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


Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. ~ Hazel Rochman