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Our topic this week is our favorite quote about books and reading
and why.
Here’s the thing – quotes, like poetry, jokes and geometrical formulae,
don’t stay in my head. I read them, I nod, I ‘like’ it if it’s on Facebook and I
move on. You can tell me the same joke every day and I’ll laugh as if I never
heard it before because my brain doesn’t retain the information. I have a
prodigious memory and always have, but only for certain things.
So what I decided to do this week is go to my favorite
source for quotes, BrainyQuote, and search there. I found no less than 1000
quotes about reading which they curated, so I’ve selected the first ten I found that appealed to me
in some way or another.
There is creative
reading as well as creative writing. Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have no idea what he was thinking but to me it points out
the reader brings their own experiences to a book, a concept which I liked…
Which leads to this quote:
Reading, after a
certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who
reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of
thinking. Albert Einstein
Oh dear, I’m afraid Dr. Einstein and I would have to agree
to disagree. Strenuously. But perhaps a mind such as his (which probably did
retain all kinds of formulae while also making up his own) was too elevated to
merely read. On a side note, I’ve eaten in the Caltech dining room where he used
to sit when he lived there…
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Now I do agree with this one:
Any book that helps a
child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing
needs, is good for him. Maya Angelou
I’ve always thought whatever the child wants to read, be it
comics or Nancy Drew or anime or the encyclopedia or whatever, should be
encouraged! Reading is reading and a child can always branch out to other material later.
A rather chilling warning here:
You don't have to burn
books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. Ray Bradbury
I liked this one:
The reading of all
good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. Rene
Descartes
Of course I don’t know that people in future centuries will
be reading my scifi romances but an
author can always hope!
One superlatively
important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always
accompanies it. H. P. Lovecraft
So true!
Personally, I like
reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what
kinds of things might happen to oneself, and they teach how to ‘Be Prepared’ to
meet them. Robert Baden-Powell.
I definitely subscribe to this one, probably in part because
of my fascination with the sinking of the Titanic,
and who survived and who didn’t. I remember giving a lot of thought as a child
to what I would have done and how hesitation in a crisis was a killer. My copy
of A Night to Remember by Walter Lord
is too dog eared to read any longer! My daughter bought me a new copy in fact.
I think that entire aspect of my nature – to be prepared (not that I was ever a
Boy Scout, or a Girl Scout LOL!) is an outgrowth of being determined not to be
left behind when all the lifeboats are gone because I dillydallied when there
was still a chance to escape. I love to read about disasters and to think
through what I would have done (or not done)…Inaction can be the worst mistake.
I have never known any
distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve. Montesquieu
So much this ^^^. Losing myself in a favorite book (hello
Nalini Singh and Psy-Changelings) can make any day better. Or becoming
engrossed in a really good new-to-me story.
We shouldn’t teach
great books, we should teach a love of reading. B F Skinner
Because speaking for myself, if I hadn’t already been a
voracious reader at a very early age, some of the BORING awful things we had to
read in junior high and high school just because they were deemed to be
CLASSICS could have turned me off books forever. (Looking at you, Charles
Dickens.)
And I’ll conclude with this:
The unread story is
not a story; it is black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it
live: a live thing, a story. Ursula K LeGuin
Happy reading!
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