Reading Closely Quotes & Sayings

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance. — Remy De Gourmont

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading. — Erica Jong

Reading was closely connected with eating; it was food for the soul. As food nourished physical life, reading nourished prayer. Hence, public reading during meals is a very ancient monastic custom. The reading that the members of a community heard in common, at meals and at other times, helped give them their unique culture. — Hugh Feiss

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce. — E.L. Doctorow

Dr. Neal Roese makes a fascinating distinction between two types of regret: regrets of action and regrets of inaction. — Mark Batterson

Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots. — Camilla Lackberg

Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you. — Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Grace is given to heal the spiritually sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes — Martin Luther

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

The most famous self-made man in the world today is our own Edison. Talk with Mr. Edison and he will tell you he owes much if not most of his success to omnivorous reading. Forbes is one of his favorite publications. How closely he reads it can be gathered from a letter just received from him in which he asks the editor to forward a long analytical letter to the writer of a series of articles which contained two figures Mr. Edison questions, and he wants to know exactly on what authority or investigation they were based. Both letters were the product of Mr. Edison and were signed by him. — B.C. Forbes

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. — Alain De Botton

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing. — Sylvia Plath

Our society has come to adopt many of the draconian measures Orwell
tried to warn us about. Cameras monitor citizens from nearly every street
corner in the United Kingdom, and there are a steadily growing number
of them mounted on traffic lights in America. The fact that Orwell's 1984
remains a part of the required reading curriculum in many high schools
across the country is laughably ironic. What is truly sad is how many readers
acknowledge the brilliant foresight of Orwell yet fail to grasp how closely
present-day America (and England) resemble Winston Smith's Oceania. — Donald Jeffries

Oh, I guess I'm physically able to father a child. That's not what I'm thinking. I'm too closely married to a quiet reading lamp. — John Steinbeck

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. — Herman Melville

You deserve to die," I whisper, suddenly realizing Iv'e said the words aloud.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing."
"Not nothing. You just told me that I deserve to be maggot feed."
"Not maggot feed, just-"
"Dead!"
"Forget it" "I don't know why I said that. Just daydreaming, I guess."
"Daydreaming about my death?"
"Forget it", I repeat.
"Are you sure you aren't still mad that I wouldn't let you borrow my vintage fishnet leggings?"
"More like I didn't want to borrow them, — Laurie Faria Stolarz

Reading may affect or damage your eyes, but I'm damn sure it will give your heart strength to understand the world very closely and in well manner. — Raj Singh

This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling. — Rebecca Solnit

Whether you realize it or not, you are a theologian. You come to a book like this with a working theology, an existing understanding of God. Whether you are an agnostic or a fundamentalist - or something in between - you have a working theology that shapes and informs the way you think and live. However, I suspect that you are reading this book because you're interested in examining your theology more closely. You are open to having it challenged and strengthened. You know that theology - the study of God - is more than an intellectual hobby. It's a matter of life and death, something that affects the way you think, the decisions you make each day, the way you relate to God and other people, and the way you see yourself and the world around you. — Michael S. Horton

You're my hero, Rhage."
Ears pricked up, Rhage watched her closely. Anything she said was important to him, and how lovely was that?
"I always thought I'd grow up and find my own hero." Rainie grimaced at herself in the mirror. Obviously she shouldn't have wasted her youth on reading and daydreaming. "But I gave up; I'm not holding out for a hero anymore. — Cherise Sinclair

Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels. — Daniel Alarcon

Once you become something, only then, are you worthy of it. — Bryant McGill

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful. — Alton Brown

But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too. — Mo Yan

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Something has spoken to me in the night ... and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: [Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth. — Thomas Wolfe

Laurel watched his lips intently as he spoke. He thought it was pretty amazing that she knew what he was saying just from reading his lips. But it also meant a lot of times her eyes were on his mouth, not meeting his gaze. Which gave him the sneaky ability to watch her more closely than he could anyone else, without her thinking he was staring. — Erin McCarthy

I wasn't writing because I was reading," Leonard says of those years, "and I was reading very closely - and deciding most people use way, way too many words — Charles J. Rzepka

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's? — Annie Dillard

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side ... — Italo Calvino