#reading

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

The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#genre-snobbery #nonfiction #popularity #reading #design

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think. ↗

— Walter Moers

#on-fiction #reading #dreams

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow. ↗

— William Wordsworth

#poetry #reading #words #dreams

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. ↗

— Stephen King

#writing #time

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#reading #wonder #dreams

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ↗

— Peter Sloterdijk

#grammar #humanism #language #reading #dreams

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#literature #reading #dreams