#reading

A book a week I heave a sigh; That Slogan's peremptory cry I will not hear, I will not heed. How can They say that I should need The book They bid me weekly buy? But Slogans change, as days go by; My Psyche listens, fluttering shy, To newer message "Come and Read A book a week." To read! to read! O wings that fly O'er sun-kissed lands, through clouded sky That bear us on where Great ones lead! I too must follow, so I plead For magic wings. I'll read (or try) A book a week! ↗

— Alexander Ireland

#reading #change

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life and death. ~ Junot Diaz, author of 2008 Pulitizer Prize novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ↗

— Leah Price

#reading #surviving #death

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#books #education #enlightenment #light #literacy

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me. ↗

— Heather King

#sobriety #solitude #design

Fiction is life by design. ↗

— Mary Kittredge

#design

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin. ↗

— Victor J. Banis

#reading #writing #dreams

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. ↗

— Stéphane Mallarmé

#reading #world

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading #feeling

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#english #literature #reading #teachers #beauty

That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#reading #dreams