What We See When We Read Quotes

“If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be make for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Once a reading of a book is under way, and we sink into the experience, a performance of a sort begins...

We perform a book-we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance.

(As readers, we are both the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience.)”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words "contain" meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning...”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can-out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers-no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed-readers' brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort. Our brains will treat a book as if it were any other of the world's many unfiltered, encrypted signals. That is, the author's book, for readers, reverts to a species of noise. We take in as much of the author's world as we can, and mix this material with our own in the alembic of our reading minds, combining them to alchemize something unique. I would propose that this is why reading "works": reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world. It is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general-one is in many many places places at at once once.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Writers reduce what they write, and readers reduce what they read. The brain itself is made to reduce, replace, emblemize... Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning.

These reductions are the world as we see it - they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world.

They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all).”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accesible experience of every river I've seen, swum in, fished, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These "rivers" are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction's ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I'll dip beneath its surface. (I'm a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river's rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park-spackled with ice. Or-the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens-of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city...)

This is a word's dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it.

(We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Thus, when we discuss the feeling of reading we are really talking about the memory of having read.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Writers closely observe the world and record their observations. When we remark that a novel is "finely observed," we are praising the writer's ability to bear witness. This bearing witness is composed of two acts: the author's initial observation in the real world, and then the translation of that observation into prose. The more "finely observed" the text, the better we readers recognize the thing or event in question. (Again-seeing and acknowledging are different activities.)”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“When we read, we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering , very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one's mind. This is a very real hazard.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“It is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“What we are looking at when we read are words, made up of letterforms, but we are trained to see past them-to look at what the words and letterforms point toward. Words are like arrows-they are something, and they also point toward something.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“When my eyes are closed, the seen (the aurora borealis of my inner eye lids) and the imagined (say, an image of Anna Karenina) are never more than a volitional flick away from each other. Reading is like this closed-eye world-and reading takes place behind lids of a sort. An open book acts as a blind-its boards and pages shut out the world's clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Characters are ciphers. And narratives are made richer by omission.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Evelyn Waugh was an illustrator. Poe was a deft portraitist. Hermann Hesse was a skilled painter, as was Strindberg. Emily and Charlotte Brontë drew, as did Goethe, Dostoevsky, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ruskin, Dos Passos, Blake, Pushkin…”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“It is not only the letterforms that are like arrows when we read...Sentences are also arrows...and paragraphs and chapters are arrows. Whole novels, plays, and stories are arrows.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Authors are curators of experience”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Maybe the reading imagination is a fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a metaphysical union of reader and author. Perhaps the author taps the universal, and becomes a medium for it. (Perhaps the process is supernatural?)”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“The outline. Not the detail.

It was blurred.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“We can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding. What happens to our imaginations when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don't understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer?

"When I am reading a sentence in a book that references something unknown to me (as when I have inadvertently skipped a passage), I feel as though I am reading a syntactically correct but semantically meaningless 'nonsense' sentence. The sentence feels meaningful -- it has the flavor of meaning -- and the structure of its grammar thrusts me forward through the sentence and on to the next, though in truth I understand (and picture) nothing.

"How much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning? How much time do we spend reading seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referents? How much of our reading takes place in such a void -- propelled by mere syntax?

"All good books are, at heart, mysteries. (Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to tum a book's pages.) A book may be a literal mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, The Brothers Karamazov) or metaphysical mystery (Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus) or a mystery of a purely architectonic kind -- a chronotopic mystery (Emma, The Odyssey).

"These mysteries are narrative mysteries -- but books also defend their pictorial secrets ...

"'Call me Ishmael ... '

"This statement invites more questions than it answers. We desire that Ishmael's face be, like the identity of one of Agatha Christie's murderers:

"Revealed!

"Writers of fiction tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories. From a novel I assemble a series of rules -- not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Authors are the curators of experience. They filter the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can-out of disorder they create narrative.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“We know ourselves and those around us by our readings of them, by the epithets we have given them, by their metaphors, synecdoches, metonymies. Even those we love most in the world. We read them in their fragments and substitutions. The”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“A knife becomes a knife through cutting…”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Can the visions of literature claim to be, like religious epiphanies, or platonic verities, more real than phenomenal reality itself? Do they point toward some deeper manner of authenticity? (Or: by mimicking the real world, do they point toward its inauthenticity?)”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Dream vision (Geoffrey Chaucer):

And in my slepe I mette, as I lay,
How African, right in that selfe aray
That Scipioun him saw before that tyde
Was comen, and stood right at my beddes syde

Poetic vision (Blake):

And by came an angel, who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins, and set them all free

Narcotic vision (Thomas De Quincey):

A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.

Hallucination (Shakespeare):

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?

Epileptic vision (Dostoyevsky):

His brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments...His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Perhaps the very notion that readers are "see-ers" and the conventions we use to describe the reading experience derive from this tradition-the tradition of visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany...

Angels, demons, burning bushes, muses, dreams, seizures, drug-induced reveries...”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read