We read privately, mentally listening to the writer's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first...
The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but...
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a...
And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...
Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. A native of America who cannot...
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
She had her addictions and one of them was reading.
Reading in Egypt is cheap and will not develop until you believe that reading is a vital necessity
Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor...
That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure-the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! {from...
I couldn't believe it. It wasn't just that he knew about Narnia. I could tell that he knew what I meant by a Narnia cubby. It was all there in his eyes. He knew that I didn't actually think I was Lucy...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...