Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]
I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into words our most intimate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a collaborative act.
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited in their awesomeness.
Sometimes when I read before bed I get so tired that my eyes gloss over the sentences without actually taking in any information, as my mind wanders in a pre dream state. That’s also how I drive 99% of the time. The other 1% I’m just flat-out asleep.
There had been a computer he had also built himself on the farthest corner of the room, but he had sold that a couple of months ago to buy me a necklace. I wore it then, it was two silver hearts linked as one. That’s what he and I were, we we’re one.
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.
There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.
Entrei numa livraria. Pus-me a contar os livros que há para ler e os anos que terei de vida. Não chegam! Não duro nem para metade da livraria! Deve haver certamente outras maneiras de uma pessoa se salvar, senão… estou perdido.
I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
If you think of religion as something that offers a picture of something more grand than us, reading does the same thing. Reading enables us to lift ourselves from our current situation to something higher – and better. It expands one’s own imagination.
Jamás vendas la biblioteca;si un día quieres deshacerte de ella, dónde, regalala a una escuela, reparte la en la glorieta del metro Insurgentes. Hay muchos que quieren leer y no tienen cómo pagar por los libros. No se vale hacer negocio.
The only thing in life that's really interesting is the contest. We are all contestants--whether we admit it or not. If I read 20 pages of a book and they're no good, I put it down. Maybe it's good after 100 pages, but I can't wait. The author lost.
