The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Quotes

“Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do."

So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan--the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“In a lovely book called On Hope, Josef Pieper explores Thomas Aquinas' theology of hope along these lines: the hopeful person is by definition a wayfarer (viator), because the virtue of hope lies midway between the two vices of despair (desperatio) and presumption (praesumptio). What despairing persons and presumptuous persons have in common is that they aren't going anywhere, they are fixed in place: the despairing because they don't think there's anywhere to go, the presumptuous because they think they have reached the pinnacle of achievement.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they'll be ready when the whim strikes you.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “cosmical and ethical hygiene.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“You can reread not from love or hatred but from a sense, often inchoate, that there's more to this book than you have ben yet able to receive.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“It’s what you’re reading that matters, and how you’re reading it, not the speed with which you’re getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Slow down. Make a point of revisiting passages that seem especially rich, or especially confusing, or for that matter especially offensive.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“But, all things considered, I believe that most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read. But why do they want to have read? Because, I think, they conceive of reading simply as a means of uploading information to their brains.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Readers who wish to follow Whim rather than whim--readers who have learned enough about what he or she really thrives on to seek more of it--the first lesson must be in humility. . . . Don't waste time and mental energy in comparing yourself to others whether to your shame or gratification, since we are all wayfarers.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“So whether you're participating in an online conversation or reading a book by yourself, your experience is a readerly one and a responsive one. The most significant difference is that reading a book is dialogically asymmetrical: you learn about the book, about its characters and perhaps its author, but none of them learns anything about you. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily regrettable: many of us should probably spend more time just listening, rather than insisting on being heard.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“George Eliot was so wounded by bad reviews that her lover and companion George Henry Lewes used to go through the papers and magazines to make sure she never saw one. And Brendan Gill tells a story about the American writer John O’Hara, who, among his many accomplishments, wrote the book for the Broadway musical Pal Joey: when some friends passed him on the streets of New York and told him that they had just seen Pal Joey again and had enjoyed it even more than they had the first time, O’Hara snapped, “What was wrong with it the first time?”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings. “Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.)”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention, and good readers know this and make the necessary adjustments.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Reading books can be intensely pleasurable. Reading is one of the great human delights.

The American reading public, or a significant chunk of it anyway, can't take its readerly pleasure straight but has to cut it with a sizable splash of duty.

Read what gives you delight - at least most of the time - and do so without shame.

Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit - for our own Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.

Most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read.

Attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term "rapt" - completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even "carried away" - that underlies life's deepest pleasures, from the scholar's study to the carpenter's craft to the lover's obsession.

This is why attentiveness is worth cultivating: such raptness is deeply satisfying.

Bodies have a natural propensity to interfere with still and quiet attentiveness.

Slow and patient reading properly belongs to our leisure hours.

I've always been a lover of silence and this love is bound up with my passion for books. Stefan Zweig

A book is a handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest. Stefan Zweig

We readers must learn to build our own "cone of silence"; the world won't do it for us.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Over the past hundred and fifty years , it has become increasingly difficult to extricate reading from academic expectations; but I believe such extrication is necessary. Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about --I scruple not to say it -- skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“But for people like Erasmus (with his “cry of thankful joy” on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz (“Can I get back to my books now?”), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Yes, I know that the word “school” derives from scholia, meaning leisure.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

“Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit”—for our own personal Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction