Quotes: Reading (9).

Reading and thinking 24 "They do not read; apparently they do not think." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street. [Reading is thinking. RayS.]

Reading and whole language 79 "…the 'global' method for teaching reading laid out two centuries later (in French, 1787) by Nicolas Adam in his A Trustworthy Method of Learning Any Language Whatsoever: 'When you show a child an object, a dress for instance, has it ever occurred to you to show him separately first the frills, then the sleeves, after that the front, the pockets, the buttons, etc?…of course not; you show him the whole and say to him: this is a dress…how children learn to speak from their nurses; why not do the same when teaching them to read…entertain them with whole words which they can understand and which they will retain with far more ease and pleasure than all the printed letters and syllables.' ” Manguel, A History of Reading. [Persuasive, but specious defense of what today is called "whole language." RayS. ]

Reading and whole language 79 "In our time, the blind learn to read…by “feeling” the entire word--which they know already--rather than deciphering it letter by letter." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading history 22 "Ultimately, perhaps, the history of reading is the history of each of its readers." Manguel, A History of Reading. [How do people read?]

Quotes: Reading (8).

Reading aloud 123 "At the same time, the act of reading out loud to an attentive listener often forces the reader to become more punctilious, to read without skipping or going back to a previous passage…." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading aloud 256 "Writing to his wife, Catherine, about reading his second Christmas story, 'The Chimes,' he [Dickens] exulted, 'f you had seen Macready [one of Dickens’s friends] last night--undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read--you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have power.' ” Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading and happiness 151 "I have sought for happiness everywhere, confessed Tomas À Kempis, early in the fifteenth century, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading and life 338 "He [William James] looked freshly at life and read books freshly." John Jay Chapman. “William James.” 1915. Gross, ed. Essays.

Reading and life 297 "…[his] glasses accuse him: here is a man who will not see the world directly, but relies instead on peering at the dead words on a printed page." Manguel, A History of Reading. [The words are not dead! They are ideas, ideas to be acted upon or at least reflected on. RayS.]

Quotes: Reading (7).

.Reading 157 "…and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge—even in extremely narrow fields." Toffler, Future Shock.

Reading 166 "In the United States today [1970] the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day." Toffler, Future Shock. [In 2009, the amount of time people spend reading newspapers has gone way down with the Internet and TV news taking over for newspaper reading. It is foreseeable that newspapers may become extinct. RayS.]

On Reading Aloud.

Reading aloud 19 "…reading out loud to him texts that I had read before on my own modified those earlier solitary readings…." Manguel, A History of Reading. [Reading aloud causes one to slow down and to comprehend more closely. RayS.]

Reading aloud 119 "The innkeeper [in Don Quixote]: During harvest time…during the festivities many of the laborers gather here, and there are always a few among them who can read, and one of them will pick up one of these books in his hands, and more than thirty strong we will collect around him, and listen to him with such delight that our white hairs turn young again." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading aloud 123 "Surrendering to the reader’s voice…removes our ability to establish a certain pace for the book, a tone, an intonation that is unique to each person." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Quotes: Reading (6a).

Reading 74 "Writing in the mid-thirteenth century, the learned Spanish King Alfonso el Sabio… 'well and truly must the teachers show their learning to the students reading to them books and making them understand to the best of their abilities; and once they begin to read, they must continue the teaching until they have come to the end of the books they have started.' ” Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading 296 "Most readers…have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible." ["Raymond, go out and play! Don't just sit around and read."] Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading 19 "Doctors and executives alike complain that they cannot keep up with the latest developments in their fields." Toffler, Future Shock.

Reading 31 "Today [1970] the United States government alone generates 100,000 reports each year, plus 450,000 articles, books, and papers." Toffler, Future Shock. [Add to that all of the blogs and self-published books, 2009.]

Reading 31 "On a worldwide basis, scientific and technical literature mounts at a rate of 60,000,000 pages a year." Toffler, Future Shock.

Quotes: Reading (6).

Reading 329 "Reading this book, you might think there was only one good kind of microbe hunter: the kind of searcher who stood on his own absolutely, who paid little attention to the work of other microbe hunters, who read nature, not books…no, Paul Ehrlich got his ideas out of books…lived among scientific books and subscribed to every chemical journal in every language he could read, and in several he couldn’t read." DeKruif, Microbe Hunters.

Reading 330 "…and queer things happened to those ideas of others when they stewed in Ehrlich’s brain." DeKruif, Microbe Hunters.

Reading 21 " 'Go out and live!' my mother would say when she saw me reading, as if my silent activity contradicted her sense of what it meant to be alive." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading 21 "…artificial dichotomy between life and reading…." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Reading 53 "[Emerson] …thought there were too many books to be read, and thought readers should share their findings by reporting to one another the gist of their studies…." Manguel, A History of Reading.

Quotes: Reading (5).

Reading 679 "People don’t get their morality from the reading matter; they bring their morality to it." Clive James. “A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses.” [Scathing review of Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz. 1980. Gross, ed. Essays. On the issue of censorship.

Reading 17 Marianne on Edward’s reading: "…how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night…to hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference…if he is not to be animated by Cowper…to hear him read with so little sensibility." Austen, Sense and Sensibility. In the days when reading aloud in the evening was their TV....

Reading 66 " In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs, darning, or making husking-gloves, I read ‘The Swiss Family Robinson to her, and I felt that the Swiss Family had no advantages over us in the way of an adventurous life." Cather, My Ántonia. Settling the prairie was as adventurous as the adventures in any book.

Reading 93 Carol: “What if some children are destructive [with books]? They learn to read; books are cheaper than minds.” Sinclair Lewis, Main Street. To which the librarian responds that her job is to maintain the books and to keep them from being destroyed by careless children.

Reading 352 "…nothing but trying to make books talk to me." Sinclair Lewis, Main Street. One way of defining reading.

Quotes: Reading (4).

Reading 289 "There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate." Montesquieu. 1722-55. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. It's a hard lesson to learn, but it's true. Reading books is the best therapy.

Reading 289 "To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; as it is, the mere act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents." Schopenhauer. 1851. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. I have several bookshelves full of books that I bought and have not read.

Reading 308 "I suspect that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready….". E. M. Forster. 1951. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. This is a potent point for teachers of English.

Reading 34 "I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself. Oscar Levant." Portable Curmudgeon. You have to have seen Levant in his films to realize how this statement fits his personality.

Reading 209 "We read that others may not read (said of reviewers/critics and censors)." Lactantius. Latin. Dictionary of Foreign Terms. The critics', reviewers', and censors' credo.