Reading

"The thing I like about reading is that it puts you in charge. You can stop and start, you can reread something, and you can imagine what the characters and places look alike. When you read, youre participant in the story. When youre watching television, youre not."

"Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live."

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one."

"Others such as these met him in the outer mountain and thought to mock him because he had not learned letters. And Antony said to them, What do you say? Which is first, mind or letters? And which is the cause of which— mind of letters or letters of mind. And when they answered mind is first and the inventor of letters, Antony said, Whoever, therefore, has a sound mind has not need of letters."

"Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive."

"No one can control what minds do when reading; it is entirely private."

"I read my eyes out and cant read half enough…. The more one reads the more one sees we have to read."

"His classical reading is great: he can quote Horace, Juvenal, Ovid and Martial by rote. He has read Metaphysics * * * Spinoza and Kant And Theology too: I have heard him descant Upon Basil and Jerome. Antiquities, art, He is fond of. He knows the old masters by heart, And his taste is refined."

"Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement."

"Libros lege. Quae legeris memento. Liberos erudi."

"“What is it exactly that you do with a book?” “You read it.” “Oh,” she said. And then, “What does read mean?” I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”"

"Reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless."