“Reading, as I have said elsewhere, is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.”
Source: How to Read Literature Like a Professor
“You need to take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.”
Source: How to Read Literature Like a Professor
“We all learn from each other when we read and discuss literature, and our readings change based on those discussions. I know mine do, in all sorts of ways. But that doesn't mean I abandon my own viewpoint, and neither should you.”
Source: How to Read Literature Like a Professor
“Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.”
“I could feel myself being surrounded. The hardest part about my job is being inconvenienced by these castaways. I needed to watch the prayer in the bag and make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, or worse, slip out and become ineffective.”
Source: Last Night, When I Prayed
“To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing--a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“There is, in fact, a whole planet of literary appreciation that is only distantly orbiting the actual texts. People declare themselves in favor of Jeffersonian democracy, or label a situation Kafkaesque, who haven’t read Jefferson or Kafka in years, or ever. Books are declared overrated, overlooked, major, minor, offensive and/or life-changing without being opened. Our shelves are full of mighty statements important to us that we haven’t quite gotten around to yet, and books from distant schooldays whose sole purpose is to show we’ve read them, and sometimes--often--we haven’t.”
Source: And Then? And Then? What Else?
“El llegir i el mai no escriure m'està fent perdre l'escriure.”
Source: Un dietari sentimental
“Reading is knowledge.
Reading enhances your knowledge.
Reading keeps you aware.
Reading enlightens your way.
Reading is a treasure.”
“Don't read the newspaper more than once a year.”
Source: How to Be Perfect: An Illustrated Guide