The Lost Art of Reading Quotes

“Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“Reading (...) is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more that for us to disengage.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“Think about it: when we read, we soul travel, in the sense that we join, or enter, the consciousness of another human. We empathize—we have to—because our experience is enlarged.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“In the United States, however, we have lost the thread of logic in the stories that we tell.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“We see it on blogs and in emails, on television talk shows, in public meetings and community forums; we are a culture that seems unable to concentrate, to pursue a line of thought or tolerate a conflicting point of view. … It’s different with a book, or any long-form piece of writing; these are slower, deeper, quieter. As readers, we are asked to slip inside the text, and if we can’t help but bring our personalities and perceptions to the process, the participation required leads to an inevitable empathy.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“…the idea that belief alone is now enough, in certain quarters, to give something the weight of truth. The effect might not be equivalent, but the implications are: that by not asking questions, by reacting rather than thinking, we allow ourselves to be susceptible to all manner of lies. Here have the fallout from the detonation of the central narrative, the breakdown of a kind of collective dialogue, in which, in the name of some amorphous fantasy of identity or ideology, we succumb to the most reptilian of our fears.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

“If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong, we never have to wrestle with complexity; if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don’t have to parse out endless shades of gray.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“replaced by a detail posted on a Web page, which may be more accurate but is probably less true. Gone is the friend you knew from home. Gone is the sled and the lake and the winter. Gone are the stories that existed in the gap between imagining and knowing and, with them, the distance that turned the particular into the universal and the mundane into the romantic.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“Facebook, with its flow of useless particularity, makes it impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every conversation back to our agendas, skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“We live in an era when everyone wants to tell his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“Now, I take it for granted that the real relationship is not with the writer but with the writing, that it’s on the page where we find the deepest sympathies”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell argued in his essay “Why I Write,”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“Pierce is referring to the collapse of collective narrative, which is what we are experiencing as a culture: left and right relying on their own news sources, Raw Story and the Daily Caller, MSNBC and Fox News. Not only that, but even the factions are factionalized, and have been since at least the 1960s. Purity, the rabid fervor of the true believer (the same for all extremists, left and right), versus pragmatism, competence.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“No, we are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

“Reading is, by its nature, a strategy for displacement, for pulling back from the circumstances of the present and immersing in the textures of a different life.”
― David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time