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Exlpore more Reading quotes

"Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."

"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."

"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."

"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."

"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."
Explore more quotes by Thornton Wilder


"It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness."


"Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them."


"But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone."


"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way."


"When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole."


"There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head."
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