“El buen lector es que tiene casi constantemente la impresión de que no se ha enterado bien.”

“When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.”

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”

“مهما كان توجهك في الحياة حاول في كل يوم أن تبذل القليل من الجهد لقراءة المقالات أو الكتب التي تخالفك الرأي وكل ما تفعله هو توسيع مدراكك وفتح قلبك أمام الجديد من الأفكار وسيقلل هذا الإنفتاح الجديد من التوتر الذي يسببه الإبتعاد عن وجهات النظر الأخرى وهذا التمرين بالإضافة إلى كونه شائقاً سوف يساعدك على رؤية البراءة في تصرفات الغير علاوة على مساعدتك في التحلي بالمزيد من الصبر كما سيزداد استرخاؤك وتصبح إنساناً أعمق فلسفة لأنك ستبدأ بإدراك المنطق وراء وجهات النظر الأخرى.”

“I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.”

“Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.”

“The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.”

“You can’t just skip the boring parts.””Of course I can skip the boring parts.””How do you know they’re boring if you don’t read them?””I can tell.””Then you can’t say you’ve read the whole play.””I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don’t read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.””Who knows?” she said. “Maybe you can’t.”

“Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.”

“You know how it is when you’re reading a book and falling asleep, you’re reading, reading… and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I’m like that all the time.”

“Anyway—because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.”

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

“A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.”

“There’s a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.”