reading

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

When I__ depressed, I read Caeiro _ he__ my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful _ yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul__ transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompleteness as a person and strove to overcome that.One of the ways in which he did that was by reading. He didn't read much, or too widely, but attentively, looking for instruction, hints for self-improvement, and he read serious books.

The first story to read is the Biblical stories.

I live in paradise within the pages of a book.

Reading illuminates our path with the brightest light.

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...

A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well.

Life is a book that someone else is reading__nd you, a key character__ence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

The primary purpose of reading the Bible is not to know the Bible but to know God.

There__ plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.

Read! Write! Imagine! Create! Love! Live!

If you are reading this, be sure to count this on your blessings list.

Was it worth while to lay_ with infinite exertion__ roof I can't live under? __ll those blueprints, closings of gaps,measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading__ot with indifference__bout a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing.