Quotes About The Act Of Reading

#1. Hrough the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

Ted Chiang

#2. It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.

Pam Brown

#3. Essential acts to master for self realisation;
Master the act of learning.
Master the act of writing.
Master the act of reading.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#4. The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

Jodi Picoult

#5. I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

Alexander Theroux

#6. The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

Carolyn Mackler

#7. It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

Nick Hornby

#8. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

E.B. White

#9. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

Alberto Manguel

#10. In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading itself. Following the line of something - not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend ...

Nuala O'Faolain

#11. In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.

Alice McDermott

#12. The act of reading is so intimate that readers are unpredictable.

Charlie Huston

#13. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

#14. The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..

Stanley Fish

#15. Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

Harold Brodkey

#16. I collect new books the way my friends collect designer handbags. Sometimes, I just like to know I have them and actually reading them is beside the point. Not that I don't eventually end up reading them. I do. But the mere act of buying them makes me happy.

Jennifer Kaufman

#17. Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of *not* picking up and *not* opening all the other books in the universe.

Pierre Bayard

#18. You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I'm telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren't reading it.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#19. Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Richard Powers

#20. As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Sam Wineburg

#21. As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave ... an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

David Brin

#22. Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

Johnny Rich

#23. I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were
of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts.

Corrie Ten Boom

#24. I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.

James Lipton

#25. For students of every ability and background, it is the simply miraculous act of reading a good book that turns them into readers. The job of adults who care about reading is to move heaven and earth to put that book into a child's hands.

Nancy Atwell

#26. My craziest on-set story comes from during the Goonies, when I came up to Spielberg and said that I wanted to climb the walls of the tunnels and that it represented my mother's womb, for some odd reason. I was reading Stanislawski at the time and Spielberg's response was "Why don't you just act."

Josh Brolin

#27. Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding
or wanting to admit
that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.

Daniel Pennac

#28. Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

Alberto Manguel

#29. Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.

Paul De Man

#30. Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Ben Okri

#31. He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

John Green

#32. We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Guy Davenport

#33. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper

Andre Breton

#34. I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Toni Morrison

#35. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.

B.J. Ward

#36. Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction ... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

David L. Ulin

#37. When you're reading, you're laughing and not quite noticing what's happening. One second you're still kind of chuckling, and then all of sudden you're in the third act of the book and in this very dark and claustrophobic place.

Moshe Kasher

#38. Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Ben Okri

#39. I cannot say why, but the simple act of reading it aloud allows you to let go of it. Do not forget this. Believe me, it helps. At first it is a very scary thing to do.

Natalie Goldberg

#40. Inviting children as gospel learners to act and not merely be acted upon builds on reading and talking about the Book of Mormon and bearing testimony spontaneously in the home.

David A. Bednar

#41. Primo Levi once said, "I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind." Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

Azar Nafisi

#42. By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

Kenzaburo Oe

#43. No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

Jonathan Lethem

#44. When we, as young women, are given the space to read, the act becomes a happy, private corner we can return to for the rest of our lives. We develop this love of reading by turning to stories that speak to the most special, secret parts of us.

Lena Dunham

#45. Running a marathon is just like reading a good book. After a while you're just not conscious of the physical act of reading.

Frank Shorter

#46. A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

August Wilson

#47. Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

Hilary Mantel

#48. Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.

Will Schwalbe

#49. And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is. Without the enthusiastic reader, who is really the author's counterpart and very often his most secret rival, a book would die.

Henry Miller

#50. I am intrigued and even moved by the idea of being right with the reader in the actuality that she or he is reading a poem. So the titles are an acknowledgment of the reality and value of that act in the world.

Matthew Zapruder

#51. The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

Marita Golden