Quotes Tagged "readers-and-writers"

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.

I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Writing, he'd said, is the most dangerous thing there is. Because when you write, you're only creating half the ideas. The reader brings the other half. And when you have two people involved in a plot, what's that called? Her answer: boring . His response: a conspiracy.

There are but twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, yet I must have read a quadrillion words.