“You have to read a book for some reason, and you're not that excited about it, but you're a good person, you're not going to say you read a book when you didn't. So you run your eyes over every single line. And yet, when you get to the end, much more quickly than you should've, you'd be hard-pressed to explain even the basics of the book. It has a main character, and that main character had a problem. Maybe? Things happened, and then the problem resolved. Probably...we didn't really read the book. We saw very page of the book.”
Source: Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out – A Hilarious Guide for Book Lovers and Lifelong Readers
“The librarium — the sum total of what reading represents and does — is strong.
Read with any consistency and you will be succored, you will be reconstituted and, if you hang tough enough, you will eventually be transformed.
Without fucking fail.”
“Even humble comic books could not escape the new puritanism. In 1952, comics were removed from the on-board bookshops of the US Pacific Fleet, on the grounds that they were too violent and graphic for marines and sailors.”
Source: The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict
“p. 364
Do you want to be the ones handing out the gasoline cans? Or the ones trying to put out the fire?”
Source: The Librarian of Burned Books
“Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.”
Source: The Way the Future Was: A Memoir
“The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer’s tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller’s breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.
But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer’s voice, and are thus shunned.
In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.”
Source: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
“Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”
Source: The Pleasure of the Text
“If he let one day pass without glancing at a single page, habit led him to feel a vague sense of decay. Therefore, in the face of most intrusions, he tried to arrange it so that he could stay in touch with the printed word. There were moments when he felt that books constituted his only legitimate province.”
Source: And Then
“Your vision will eventually lead you to victory. Keep working on it, and opt to be more progressive.”
Source: A Manual for Victory