A Quote by Wendy Lesser
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different.
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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.
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Our philosophy is about reaching back to move forward. We have something different to say with a sensibility that is both old and new.
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
The main reason I decided to study Latin American literature was because I'd gotten somewhat bored by the American fiction I was reading. I am not drawn to a specific style or aesthetic. When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily - English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods. Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.
With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
I've changed my whole angle for dance. I'm moving towards moving back rather than hanging out with my peers. I'm reaching back to older dudes for a second.
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
For me, I was in school and I pushed myself to be a good student, just because that's the type of person I was, but I never had a connection to any of it. I don't think my brain functioned in a way that was at its height, when I was in school. I needed something like art to really value the way my mind works. I wasn't reaching my full potential by sitting in a classroom and reading from a book. My mind didn't work that way.
I want to make sure kids read by the third grade and are prepared for the fourth grade. As school gets harder and kids get older, the words get bigger... If they don't understand what they are reading, they start to fall back, and their interest in school falls off.
Most of the times that I've written break-up songs, it's been different because I was always trying to get back to something: get back to a situation or talk my way or sing my way back into the relationship.
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.
Most of us spend our lives convinced that there's something missing: "If only I had a bigger barbecue, more money, a bigger car, a different wife, a different.... If only I could upgrade somehow, then I would be okay."
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