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"If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul."
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"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
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Personal Development
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
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Personal Development
"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
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Personal Development
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
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Personal Development
"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."
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Personal Development
"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
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Personal Development
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
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Personal Development
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
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Personal Development
"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
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Personal Development
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"You will put on a dress of guilt and shoes with broken high ideals."
Dress
"We shouldn't have got married, really. Shouldn't have got married. Too young. Not ready for it."
Reading
"If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul."
Reading
"I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems."
Computer
"Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it."
Poetry
"People can put their best poems straight onto the web."
People
"I was put off by people at school - my cabbage wasn't as good as other people's, you know, so that put me off."
People
"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."
Poet
"If I decide to be indecisive, that's my decision."
Decision-Making
"I wish the word whimsical wasn't used now."
Now
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