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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Reading makes immigrants of us all,” she wrote years later. “It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
“My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”
a variety of statistics that, as so often happens, were massaged to prove the point:
I highlighted this because of the word “massaged.” It seems that’s what we’re offered by the media daily: statistics and facts that have been “massaged” to reflect an intended message. Both liberals and conservatives are guilty!!!
who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves.
Discussions about the kind of reading that constitutes a core college curriculum too often ignore those alternate uses of reading, uses that are quite apart from educating.
It’s the same with all levels of education. Reading is less about reading what is “best” in the eyes of a teacher or professor and more about what individual readers need.
as Alberto Manguel writes in his wonderful A History of Reading, “I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading.”)
There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.
one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general.
I agree completely! These kinds of assignments cultivate an aversion for reading instead of a love for it.
Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books.
Yes, that’s me!
