A Quote by Gabriel Zaid

What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.

Gabriel Zaid

Quote Topics

After Alive Anything Books Clouds Date Does Does It Matter Existence Feel How Makes Many Matter Matters Mean More Others Physically Read Reading See Street Thousands Up Up-To-Date Us What Matters Whether

Quote Author

Gabriel Zaid
Mexican - Writer
Born: 1934

Your life does matter. It always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger. It always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia. It always matters how you treat other people, how you treat animals, and how you treat yourself. It always matters what you do. It always matters what you say. And it always matters what you eat.

John Robbins

It's not a matter of how much you know or can define, or how many millions of mantras or thousands of prostrations you have done, or how many months of wangs you've attended. The important thing is whether or not the mind is really changing, whether our negative emotions are really coming under control, whether we are really beginning to understand ourselves, whether our mind is really improving, and whether in our hearts there is genuine love and caring for other people.

Tenzin Palmo

Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry with me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves me or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.

Lydia Davis

It's easy to sell good news like this, and the authors confidently rely on classic fallacious arguments. They argue by declaration, which is what makes the books so amusing. In matter-of-fact, authoritative tones, the authors tell us how plants and human beings exchange energy - or they describe what angels look like, whether or how they're sexed, how they communicate with human beings, and how they differ from ghosts. Readers might be expected to wonder, How do they know?

Wendy Kaminer

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

Amy Tan

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.

Daniel Pennac

When I see those kids out there, how they play, how they train, how they look up to us, it makes me feel happy.

Marko Arnautovic

My personal view is that reading has to be balanced. Obviously, there's a certain amount of reading that we have to do academically to continue to learn and to grow, but it's got to be balanced with fun and with elective reading. Whether that's comic books or Jane Austen, if it makes you excited about reading, that's what matters.

Emma Walton Hamilton

Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it's Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.

Buzz Aldrin

No matter how good a story is, if you're at a newsstand and you see a lot of comic books, you don't know how good the story is unless you read it. But you can spot the artwork instantly, and you know whether you like the artwork, whether it grabs you or not.

Stan Lee

If you recognize how you are most effective - whether it's how you present yourself or whether it's how you speak, how you convey enthusiasm - when you realize what makes you feel like your most confident self, that's when you are going to be your best. You just have to figure out what makes you effective in your environment. As long as you get that right, they are always going to remember you a lot more!

Alexis Maybank

The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment. We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.

Maryanne Wolf

There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.

David Sedaris

Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.