“Tea and biscuits aren’t as tempting as stories, not for a bookworm”
Source: Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book
“Because reading, Nancy knew, helped people find dreams of their own . . . with the turn of every page.”
Source: Library Girl: How Nancy Pearl Became America's Most Celebrated Librarian
“It is not only in the religious writings of various peoples that I find truth. I find that my forbearance is widened, my understanding of human potential expanded, as I read fiction, even if it is only to disagree with a narrow or ugly view of life, or to turn away from discontent. The fiction to which I turn and return is that which has a noble understanding of God’s purpose for all that has been created.”
Source: Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life
“All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.”
Source: The Simple Art of Murder
“If we do not voluntarily keep our promises to God to read, He will see to their fulfillment some other, less pleasant, way. God thinks reading important!”
Source: The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking
“Well-read and researched always well presented”
“I needed a book in case of emergencies."
"You mean like being attacked by foul-mouthed highwaymen?"
"No, I mean those moments when nothing important is happening, such as during travel. After supper. Before sleeping. Or whilst one's opponent reloads their gun.”
Source: The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels
“[T]he idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.”
Source: How to Read Now
“When artists bemoan the rise of political correctness in our cultural discourse, what they’re really bemoaning is the rise of this unexpected reader. They’re bemoaning the arrival of someone who does not read them the way they expect—often demand—to be read; often someone who has been framed in their work and in their lives as an object, not as a subject.”
Source: How to Read Now
“Books are just like Rorschach tests. The patterns we find in a book’s ink reveal far more about us than they do about them. Our feelings, reviews, perceptions, and understandings of a book — as well as the meaning, value, and patterns we find within them — always say more about us than they do about the book.”
Source: Heaven and Hurricanes