stuff your eyes with wonder
❝ I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world. ❞
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
❝ I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all. ❞
José Saramago, The Notebook
❝ I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle. ❞
Kurt Vonnegut
❝ When I am deep in a book, my life no longer exists. ❞
Read and reread Cynthia Cruz’s beautiful, mesmerizing essay, On Reading, today. (via therumpus)
❝ Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. ❞
Susan Sontag, A Letter to Borges
❝ But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination that you might know at any given moment what to do with that to be cursed with too little to give you—an other people—any trouble. ❞
Eudora Welty
❝ Ya hoy la historia no es más que la estrecha hebra de lo recordado sobre el océano de lo olvidado, pero el tiempo sigue su marcha y llegará la época en que los años tengan muchas cifras, y la memoria del individuo, que habrá permanecido igual en su extensión, no será capaz de abarcarlos; por eso irán desapareciendo de ella siglos y milenios enteros, siglos de cuadros y música, siglos de descubrimientos, batallas, libros, y eso será grave, porque el hombre perderá la conciencia de sí mismo y su historia, inconceptuable, incontenible, se encogerá en unas cuantas abreviaturas carentes de sentido. ❞
Milan Kundera, La broma
❝ Nuestra verdad posible tiene que ser invención, es decir escritura, literatura, pintura, escultura, agricultura, piscicultura, todas las turas de este mundo. Los valores, turas, la santidad, una tura, la sociedad, una tura, el amor, pura tura, la belleza, tura de turas. ❞
Julio Cortázar, Rayuela
❝ You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. ❞
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
❝ I felt happy inside these songs (inside the glass cabin of these songs) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and soul… and it seemed to me that inside these songs I was at home. ❞
Milan Kundera, The Joke
❝ [M]ay you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. ❞
Ray Bradbury
❝ I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often. ❞
Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
❝ Sometimes I think with movies or with music or with television, a show or a song will help describe who you are or what you mean at a time when you’re unable to express that for yourself. It’s such a relief to listen to a song or watch a movie or television show and think, “That’s it! That’s how I feel.” It’s so validating. ❞
Carrie Brownstein
❝ Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,” Matilda said to her. “Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same. The way he tells it I feel I am right there on the spot watching it all happen.”

“A fine writer will always make you feel that,” Mrs Phelps said. “And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music. ❞
Roald Dahl, Matilda
❝ I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. ❞
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
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