Quotes
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For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Orlando
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Norwegian Wood
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself
To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight
I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve
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