All Quotes By Tag: Reading

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”

“Don’t set your goals by what other people deem important.”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.”

“أمقت تلك المسافات التي تفصلني عنك ،أتذمر من تلك المواقيت التي تسرقني منك ..أسخط على أعين تتأملك / على أنامل تلمسكعلى أنفاسك وهي تستنشقك !على نبضاتك وهي تستشعرك ، على ثيابك وهي تعانقك”

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.”

“أنا أخبئ بين أقفاص صدري أوجاع نساء الأرض ودموع الصغار ،أنا أحمل على عاتقي خيبات ثكلى !وفي حنجرتي تستقر حشرجة حزن مدوية ..أنا الأنثى التي تقام كل ليلة على مدائن قلبهامآتم الخذلان !وبالرغم من ذلك الأسى المفرط .. .تبتسم وتمضي دونما إكتراث !”

“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)”

“اعذرني !!لن ألوث طهري ونقائي لمجرد إرضائك ،ولن أدنس مبادئي لأكسب شرف قربك مني ..ولن أنزع رداء الطفولة من روحي من ذاتي من وجداني ..لأكون في نظرك أنثى كاملة النضوجهذه أنا إن أردتني بطهري بطفولتي بنقائي بوفائي بعطائي !!وإن لم ترغب بنجلائك كما هي ..إذهب إليهن وغادرنيفكثيرات ياسيدي من هن بحجم رغباتك !وقليلات / قليلات من هن بحجم نقائي !”

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”

“MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote “Don’t be a ninny”alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page.One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.Another notes the presence of “Irony”fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths.Absolutely,” they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written “Man vs. Nature”in a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the RyeI borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It’s not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today’s Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn’t particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”