reader

Sit here, so I may writeyou into a poem and make you eternal.

I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple minds who can't take in the strong content they provide

For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something _ distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world _ but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before.

Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.

That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.

I am going to build a fortress of books.Will you come inside and live with me?

When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather.

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?

However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.

The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

When we step onto the bridge, Nathan turns and spreads his arms out wide. __elcome to Pont des Arts, a.k.a. The Lock Bridge.

I freeze, my feet suddenly glued to the floor. It takes me a minute to gather the courage to turn around, but when I do, I immediately wish I hadn't. The boy is standing in the doorway at the end of the hall.Why is he here again? I barely allow myself time to ask the question before I move. Panicked, I turn and run back downstairs as fast as I can."Hey! Wait!" he calls after me.I don't stop.

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.