A Quote by Edith Pearlman
Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.
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No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.
There's a difference between the world ending tomorrow and just drinking and drugging yourself to death.
I'm not going to make judgments about what people are reading. I just want them to be reading. And I think reading one book leads to another book.
But let us laugh carelessly like other men. Let us be timid even among fools. Let us knot silence around our throats. For they would surely kill us.
When we want a book exactly like the one we just finished reading, what we really want is to recreate that pleasurable experience--the headlong rush to the last page, the falling into a character's life, the deeper understanding we've gotten of a place or a time, or the feeling of reading words that are put together in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. We need to start thinking about what it is about a book that draws us in, rather than what the book is about.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.
Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
The Internet changes everything. People are online meeting boyfriends and girlfriends, you don't have to be out drinking and drugging to find somebody nowadays.
Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.
The happiest people among us are those who can sleep when they want to.
I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise.
Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?
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