#reading

Până și lectura are o funcție mitologică, nu numai pentru că înlocuiește rostirea miturilor în societățile arhaice și literatura orală, care se mai păstrează în comunitățile rurale din Europa, ci mai ales pentru că îi permite omului midern o „ieșire din timp”, asemănătoare cu cea înlesnită de mituri (...) omul modern este proiectat, prin lectură, în afara duratei sale personale și integrat altor ritmuri, trăind într-o altă „istorie”. ↗

— Mircea Eliade

#myth #reading #nature

In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can remember something about each. As a historian once said, some stare at me reproachfully, grumbling that I have never read them. One may remind me vaguely of a time when I was interested in romantic novels. An old college text will elicit a pang of unhappiness about studying. Each book has its character, and even books I know very well also have this kind of wordless flavor. Now if I step back from the shelf and look quickly across both bookcases I speed up that same process a hundredfold. Impressions wash across my awareness. But each book still looks back in its own way, answering the rude brevity of my gaze, calling faintly to me out of the corner of my eye. At that speed many books remain wrapped in the shadows of my awareness--I know I have looked past them and I know they are there, but I refuse to call them to mind. ↗

— James Elkins

#bookshelves #looking #reading #nature

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences. ↗

— John Irving

#relationships #romantic

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#novels #reading #science

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#reading #science

Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself! (from Tooth and Claw in Season 2) ↗

— Russell T. Davies

#knowledge #reading #weapons #knowledge

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. ↗

— Germaine Greer

#libraries #reading #sexuality #virginity #innocence

If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job. ↗

— John Berry

#libraries #library #reading #job

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#reading #noble

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#escape #escapism #fiction #interpretation #narrative