reading

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

The best feeling in the world might be when you finish a book and you get to pick out another.

The treasures in my house are books.

The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

You can Save Time with Writing but you can Save a Life by Reading.

President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: "The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.

The greatest treasures are books.

There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold.

When you__e in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don__ want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.

Don__ you think it__ better to continue reading than to just close the book?

Good aims not always make good books.

She probably had her nose stuck in a book, living in a pretend fantasy world while I was actually out there living in the real fantasy world.

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you__ opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are __egs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours._ Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while.

Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.'There's a library?''Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.

Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love).Stolen from what?From the tyranny of living.

We human beings build houses because we're alive, but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either.