A Quote by Richard Louv

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?
Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.
Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. Twain wrote 'Tom Sawyer' at 41 and bettered it with 'Huckleberry Finn' at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.
Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.
When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.
I was always a slow reader, from the very beginning. I remember in first grade our teacher divided us into groups, and I was definitely in the slow group. She didn't call it that, but everybody in the class knew. But I still loved reading. Being a slow reader affected my grades in school, but it didn't affect my love for reading. I still loved going to the library, and I still loved reading books.
When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination.
By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.
There are two kinds of reading, reading which is contemplation - even a kind of vision & reading for information. For the first only the best will do, for the rest - then one can let in anything one would like to read in the world.
I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.
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.
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
I never read a horse book in my life. But I thought that's what my friends were reading and that's what I should be reading. And this was "Dobbin Does This" and "Dobbin Does That."
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.
Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.
When you read a book, you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination.
I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!