Books Promiscuously Read Quotes

“Literacy is a human right, an individual competence inextricable from social health. Access to it is a question of social justice, a nonnegotiable entitlement of citizenship. To say...that not everyone has to be a reader is different from saying that not everyone should be taught to read. Everyone has a fundamental right to learn to read. A society in which people are actively denied literacy, or a society that neglects literacy in wide segments of its population, has reason to be ashamed. If the ascendance of the written word may be imagined as a fall from the original paradise of oral culture, the labor with which we are tasked for that primal transgression is making the world of writing available to all comers. It is an enormous labor, requiring unflagging, communal commitment.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“There is a radical acceptance of equivalence in poetic language, a willingness to see, say, and celebrate the fact that things are like other things, which are like other things in turn. Immersion in equivalences comes at a cost, however, to the human desire that certain things be totally unlike and distinguishable from other things. For example, we would prefer that innocence not look like guilt. We would prefer that violence, savagery, and waste be wholly, and obviously, distinct from creation, art, and fulfillment. This is not the way things work very often in life, or in poetry.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“A poem is among reading's slowest roads....What is it to have read a poem well? To have caught an allusion, admired a formal twist, heard a music in the silent tumble of letters on the page? How long does it take to read a poem, anyway? Such reading does not proceed in continuous, countable units of hours and days. It is a minute, minutes, here and there, intense and distracted, questing, between trips to the dictionary, and it consists in endless, endless repetition. There is a great deal less reading than reading where poems are concerned. A poem once read is the first note of a symphony, a toe dipped in the water, the first mouthful after a fast--necessary experiences all, with joys of their own, but still preludes. A poem comes into being by means of our repeated encounters with it, and each of these encounters must stay slow. It is hard to stay slow enough to keep pace with a poem.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“...reading is like dreaming, and subject to some of the same suspicions. Are dreams (are books) messages from parts of ourselves we can't otherwise bear to know? Is dreaming (is reading) a sacred experience or a kind of psychic housekeeping? Perhaps most especially, are dreams (are books) an alternative to reality or an aspect of it? How do we know the difference between our real life and our dreaming (reading) life? What happens when the line gets blurred?”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“The mind freed to wander in books is never again free of the consequences of that wandering. The mind so freed becomes largely constituted by that wandering, and capable as a result of breathtaking defiances of time, circumstance, and probability.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“...What...could the free choice to read 'boring' books be? Reading books that -other people- find boring is not the issue. Ravenous readers do that all the time, looking up only every now and then to wonder vaguely how anyone could be bored by them. The choice to read what is boring to oneself, however, which nearly always involves suppressing the knowledge that one is in fact bored, is a kind of suicide of the mind, a refusal to visit the wellspring of one's own voice.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“Part of reading is accretive, language building up in the mind to form the book we draw from the pages before us and subsequently carry within us. But another part of reading...lives only in the present, is a transient experience that exists only in the now and now as we do it. Love of that impossible-to-hold experience is why readers also tend to be habitual rereaders. We read in part to find out what happens, but even more so to be part, over and over again, and never twice in exactly the same way, of its happening.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life