reading

Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world.

It is neither poor handling nor the weather that turns the pages of a book a fine sepia. It is the reader's imagination.

The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don__ answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I__ still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you__e far away and can__ sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can__ live without.I want to be someone you can__ live without.

A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I__l bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction__ntil he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define __iterature_. The Latin root simply means __etters_. Those letters are either delivered__hey connect with an audience__r they don__. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that__ because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books__nd thus what they count as literature__eally tells you more about them than it does about the book.

You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Every man whose tastes have been allowed to develop in wrong directions, or in whom the best tastes have failed of higher perfection, loses thereby from the inner joy and outer value of his whole life. Every good taste is a source and guarantee of happy healthy hours and days, and thus of the enrichment and elevation of life. A reasonable capacity to appreciate music and art quite suffices to enrich life and exercise a wholesome influence upon character. The taste for good reading is inseparable from a taste for good thinking.

Self-publishing a shitty book doesn't make you an author any more than singing in the shower makes you a rockstar or squeezing your pimple makes you a dermatologist.

History will always repeat itself, because it makes for good reading. It doesn't have to be truthful or factual, just entertaining with the odd fact thrown in for good measure.

You__e got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem.

Hold fast to the word of God.

You ought to the read stories of how people have endured worst situation. You will find the strength to survive life.

If you read stories, you find the strength, faith and hope to survive everyday life.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak in one day at the right time. When the readers on a new path to find. So for now I'll continue to drop ink and not worry about what other people think.