Quotes & Sayings About Reading With Explanation

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation. — Denise Mina

Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive, while illuminating how tragically absurd life is. So our reasons for reading are as strange as our reasons for living. And no one has the right to call that intimacy into account. — Daniel Pennac

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading. — Archibald MacLeish

I read the Bible when I was 12 while studying for my bar mitzvah. I was also reading a lot of Dilbert comics at the time, and I guess the two kind of got fused in my mind. I've always imagined God as an irrational, distractible boss. It's my best explanation for our planet. — Simon Rich

But to return to my own case, I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as "my" readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers - it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether "it really is like that," I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written (though a discrepancy in this respect need not always be the consequence of an error on my part, since the explanation could also be that the reader had eyes for which my book was not a suitable instrument). — Marcel Proust

Bruce worked very hard on an obscure document about prophecy and how some people could experience events that were later realized. Scientists did not find any rational explanation for this but often called it a process of intuitive repetition. Bruce also read about second thoughts, often quite unlike the original. They came to some people like a flash, in the middle of the night. Finally, he read a combination of intuitive repetitions and that blazing nights could, as the result of revelation, find of great importance. He read that it was one of those big inventors' ways of approaching a new unknown. These were difficult concepts to understand, and Bruce fell asleep while reading. — J.M.K. Walkow

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep. — Stanislaw Ulam

Stunned, I sat down on the bed, reading the message over and over again, convinced I had misunderstood it in some way. I couldn't believe that Jack would have written something so cruel or been so cutting. He had never spoken to me in such a way before, he had never even raised his voice to me. I felt as if I'd been slapped in the face. Surely I deserved some explanation and, at the very least, an apology? I needed to talk to someone, badly, so it was sobering to realise there was no one I could call. My parents and I didn't have the sort of relationship that would allow me to sob down the phone that he had left me by myself and for some reason I felt too ashamed to tell any of my friends. Where had the perfect gentleman I'd thought him to be gone? Had it all been a facade, had he covered his true self with a cloak of geniality and good humour to impress me? — B.A. Paris

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is. — Daniel Pennac

Millions of flying saucers landin' all the time and the government keeps hushing it up.' 'Why?' said Wensleydale. Adam hesitated. His reading hadn't provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarian just took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up. 'Cos they're the government,' said Adam simply. 'That's what governments do. They've got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they've hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets into work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that's happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them.' 'I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper,' said Wensleydale, — Terry Pratchett