Famous Quotes & Sayings

Phil Keoghan

Stories have inspired me all my life. I like reading about what other people have done and it inspires me to share my own stories, and encourage people to make their own life stories.

That makes sense, I suppose. But for me, reading is an adventure. It makes me an armchair traveler and takes me places I shall never be able to go.

Laura Lippman

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

Lance Loud

When you've grown sick of reading and bug-eyed from watching TV, when your friends are all visited out, no words can adequately praise the link to the outside world provided by your parents and family.

Lance Morrow

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

John Taylor Gatto

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

John Taylor Gatto

It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

John Taylor Gatto

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

John Selden

Patience is the chiefest fruit of study; a man that strives to make himself different from other men by much reading gains this chiefest good, that in all fortunes he hath something to entertain and comfort himself withal.

James Joyce

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

James Joyce

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Rollins

I subscribe to National Geographic, Scientific American, Discover, and a slew of other magazines. And it is while reading articles for pleasure and interest that an interesting What if? will pop into my head.

James Richardson

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

James Salter

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

James Russell Lowell

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

James Russell Lowell

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

James Russell Lowell

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

James Russell Lowell

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

Laurence Sterne

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

Laurence Sterne

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

Laurence Sterne

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

Friedrich Schiller

The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the condition in which their birth has placed then.

Frederick Sanger

A DNA sequence for the genome of bacteriophage ΦX174 of approximately 5,375 nucleotides has been determined using the rapid and simple 'plus and minus' method. The sequence identifies many of the features responsible for the production of the proteins of the nine known genes of the organism, including initiation and termination sites for the proteins and RNAs. Two pairs of genes are coded by the same region of DNA using different reading frames.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I suggest a nationwide reading of the Holy Scriptures during the period from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas.

Jon Bernthal

I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be.

Johnny Cash

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

Louis Menand

Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.

Nicolas Cage

I don't want you to think that I'm up late reading a stack of Spider-Man comics and eating a tray of lemon cookies while sucking my thumb. I'm not doing that. But I am loyal to the influences of my childhood.

Nicolas Cage

I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I'm reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.

Nicholson Baker

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Nicholson Baker

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.

Nicholson Baker

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

Norah Jones

I've always loved to read. But sometimes I go for a year without reading, because I forget to.