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Quote by Te-Ping Chen

“As a child she was always reading: Even at meals she would sit and scan the back of the juice box. She must have read it a million times: aspartame and xanthan gum and red no. 9. It wasn't a conscious thing; she just seemed to feel uncomfortable when her eyes weren't fastened to a page.”

Quote by Te-Ping Chen

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Land of Big Numbers

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Te-Ping Chen

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“She began spending days on end in bed. She ate too little and then too much. Her stomach hurt, her head ached, her heart fluttered inside her. She was cross and absentminded and began crying like a crocodile over the most sentimental stories--because of course she went on reading. What else was there for her to do? She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn't taste bad, but she was still unhappy.”

“If ducks could read, what books would they choose to eye absorb? Probably biographies of Amelia Earhart.”

“Why the constant rereading? Is it not obvious? Firstly, reading and rereading distract him from thinking about himself, from enumerating the reasons behind his self-imposed predicament, from dwelling on his endless plight. Secondly, he rereads to remind himself what truly good writing is, how it formidably contrasts with what he published. Perhaps he’ll finally learn something. To apply to what? To apply to nothing.”

“I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It’s a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.”