Quotes+About+Reading

Throughout the semester, please find quotes that you think are pertinent and add them to this page.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. --bell hooks

Those who can read see twice as well. --Menander (4th century BC)

The way of words, of knowing and loving words, is a way to the essence of things, and to the essence of knowing. --John Dunne

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own spirit, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and most complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. --Hermann Hesse

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning. --Maya Angelou

It seems to me that, beginning with the age of two, every child becomes for a short peiod of time a linguistic genius. Later, beginning with the age of five to six, this talent begins to fade. There is no trace left in the eight-year-old of this creativity with words, since the need for it has passed. --Kornei Chukovsky

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself, But I felt that, I too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real true world. My perfect island. --Anna Quindlen

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. . . I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read--not just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled like railway carriages, but a real book. It was paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the water rising above his waist--an adventure of Dixon Brett, detective. All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realized even then that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment. --Graham Greene

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read. --Joseph Epstein

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community. --bell hooks

Reading is an act of interiority, pur and simple. Its object is not the mere consumption of informaiton. . . .Rather, reading is the occasion of the encounter with the self. . . The book is the best thing human beings have done yet. --James Carroll