reading-habits

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

If a nation reads what is good with a good understanding, it gets a good understanding for a good nation building!

I am thankful to my teachers who taught me how to read.

If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing a man you are, the more miserable a man you will be in the day of recompense; your light and knowledge will more torment you than all the devils in hell. Your knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash you, and that scorpion that will forever bite you, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw you; therefore read, and labor to know that you may do--or else you are undone forever.

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !

Drop everithing and read.

Life is too short to waste your time with bad books.

Read whatever book you lay your hands on if you can, for every writer has a story to tell

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

I have found that reading is much better than a good sleep.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf.

That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.

There are books that change our perspectives and books that change our personalities.

Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover__ besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls __he mad pride of intellectuality,_ taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.

People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.