reading

It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.

Writers possess magic. It's in their w

Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own--my words are gone.

The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.

He claimed he had read the book so many times that the words had fallen out of it and the pages were all blank so he had to read the book to put the words back in or the book would be forlorn and naked.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture.

In politics no permanent friends, no permanent enemies but permanent interest.

Don__ let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it__ a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that__ almost the same thing.

Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

They were...no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved.

These two oo in "book" are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren__ there, but might be. And even that didn__ matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there. They could bring their somethings to a text, as co-creators, embedding a needed reality in the story that, if it was flexible enough, would allow new threads to take their place beside the author__.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

I don't fear death--I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.