Choice In Reading Quotes & Sayings

Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults leaving the educational system who had never heard of al Qaeda. Both by the way had passed the multiple-choice reading section of the state's high school exit exam. — Kelly Gallagher

There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars. — Thomas B. Macaulay

What does it mean, this notion of ... reading? ... it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of all we need to savor
this instant, this scene, this line. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. As we do, we join a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged. — David L. Ulin

Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore. — John Milton

I am reading a terrible sententious book called The Wedding of Herbert Mimnaugh. Firstly, what sort of a name is Herbert and why would a parent with any trace of natural affection wish to afflict their child with such a name? Herbert's parents do not feature prominently in the book when this choice alone makes it obvious that they are the most interesting people in it. — Zen Cho

I always say - a prejudice on my part, I'm sure - you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves.
This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes.
There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas. — Haruki Murakami

You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman."
"Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep I followed them. — Ray Bradbury

Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I'm here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn't visit. I'm here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can't possibly interfere more in your life than what you're already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there's no reason to feel any empathy for you. — Robin Sacredfire

I, on the other hand, am very concerned about how word choice will affect my readers. For instance, in the description of Genesis, I chose the term 'good and evil' instead of 'right and wrong', which are basically two same terms. I wanted to use 'right and wrong' because it definitely will ignite more controversies than 'good and evil', but I chose to use the latter because I was afraid of the social influence that can come from reading my book, and although there is no adult material at all in the book, I could risk getting my book banned. — Andreas Laurencius

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head. — Paul Auster

Its your decision, Simon Lewis," said Magnus. "Remain in the existence you have, go to college, study music, get married. Live your life. Or
you can have an uncertain life of shadows and dangers. You can have the joy of reading the stories of incredible happenings, or you can be part of the story."
"The choice is up to you — Cassandra Clare

My brother was one of the bigger influences in my life, in as much as he told me I didn't have to read the choice of books that I as recommended at school, and that I could go out to the library and go and choose my own, and sort of introduced me to authors that I wouldn't have read.probably. You know, the usual things like the Jack Kerouacs, the Ginsbergs, the ee Cummings and stuff. — David Bowie

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion. — Joseph Brodsky

The choice is yours: Enjoy a delicious meal of, say, veal fantarella with grilled vegetables. Or spend a quiet hour reading David Gregory's book. You may find an altogether different sort of hunger has been sated by the final page. Brilliant in its simplicity, fearless in its presentation of the truth, Dinner with a Perfect Stranger is one invitation you'll want to RSVP. — Liz Curtis Higgs

The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice. — Vironika Tugaleva

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related. — Francois Mauriac

I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice
at least in my reading
I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. — Anne Fadiman

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice -
has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the
fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature
Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives — Charlie Brooker

Dear You, The odds of your reading this are slim to none. Who would choose uncertainty and vaguely worded warnings over a new life of wealth and luxury? I can only assume that you were put under a massive amount of stress, touched someone's skin, and they were paralyzed. Or blinded. Or lost the ability to speak. Or befouled themselves. Or one of several other effects that I won't outline right now. In any case, I know what it's like the first time it happens. It's like a door opening up inside of you, isn't it? Like you've been hit by a truck. It can't be ignored. So even if you would have preferred to open up the other box (which, by the way, would have had you living out the rest of your life as Jeanne Citeaux), I'm glad you made this choice. Take both suitcases with you and go to the address below. The key in this envelope will get you in, and you should be safe there. It has no connection to me, officially. Open the next envelope when you are established. Try not to be followed. — Daniel O'Malley

Make careful choice of the books which you read:
let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence.
Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and
hands and other books be used as subservient to it.
While reading ask yourself:
1. Could I spend this time no better?
2. Are there better books that would edify me more?
3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest
lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life?
4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God,
kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come?
"The words of the wise are like goads, their collected
sayings like firmly embedded nails - given by one Shepherd.
Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of
making many books there is no end, and much study
wearies the body." Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 — Richard Baxter

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award — Kate DiCamillo

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom."
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us, consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all casualty, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still. — M T Anderson

From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth. — Robert Aris Willmott

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only? — Adrienne Rich

I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age. — Thomas Jefferson

Reading, he claims, would broaden my experience of the world. The ideas to be found in serious books would deepen my thinking about every choice I make. — Sena Jeter Naslund

I.P. was at that age when our sense of who we are, or of who we have been told we are, chafes against what we discover in our reading. And immediately a choice seems to appear: to let the reading show us the way forward, like water picking its course over unfamiliar ground; or to direct the reading, to channel the stream, so that it confirms what we already think we know. I.P. was among those few people who could do the former. He had a mind that welcomed doubt and uncertainty; he revelled in it, in fact; he was not one to ever make the perilous decision of deciding to know. His mind was happy to grope its way to its own conclusions, happy to breathe easy in a state of unknowing. — Aatish Taseer

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

I'm the enemy because I like to think. I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy that could sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs or the side order of gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I would eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese. Okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I might suddenly feel the need to. Okay, pal? — Denis Leary

There was no point in being an angel - that lesson had been drilled into him early and often. Hey, the Bible hadn't been his first choice of reading material, but once foisted on him, he twisted it to his advantage. According to the Good Book, angels got the short end of the stick. Lots of work for very little recognition.

But everyone knew Satan. — S.E. Jakes

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media. — Martijn Benders

A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation. — David Nicholls

The highest branch of solitary amusement is reading; but even in the choice of books the fancy is first employed; for in reading, the heart is touched, till its feelings are examined by the understanding, and the ripening of reason regulate the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments. — Mary Wollstonecraft