RUINED BY READING: A Life in Books

Here are some quotaions from Lynne Sharon Schwartz's book:

--"...I'm not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on its properly framed 'interference." [i.e., reading "interferes" with your otherwise 'free-thinking" mind....such interference is more likely an interaction, a dialogue, a matter of widening your perspective.] (1)

--"Reading...offer[s}...a delectable exercise for the mind." (3)

--"only language thrills" (5)

--"...the long slow being with the book, feeling the shape of the words, their roll and tumble in the ear." (8)

--"How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer." (13)

---"Above all, [in art history] there was the pure visual pleasure a picture could give, a pleasure beyond what might be read in it. This pleasure the instructor did not discuss..." (22)

--"...reaaders are accustomed to receiving information in the narrative mode." (23)

--"For purposeful. dutiful reading, the reading of 'texts,' we apply a special sort of concentration, special because it is applied. Willed. Such reading may be pleasant, but it is pleasant work, the kind of work I can easily and dutifully do in the daylight ours. It goes fast because we are looking for something rather than allowing something to happen." (111)

--"I am still a slow reader..." (111)

--"Reading is...escape from the boundaries of our own voices and idioms." (111-112)

--"...the writers who claim our atttention do so by voice and idiom, which are the audible manifestations of the mind. This is how it sounds inside, they declare. Listen, hear the shape with me." (113)

---"When I began, I thought reading would transform my life, or at least teach me how to live it. It does teach something, many things, but not what I naively expected. In the thick of experience, snatches of bookish wisdom do not serve." (114)

--"Indeed, what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on." (115)

--"Reading teaches receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan. The speaker ends herself and we do the same, a mutual and ephemeral exchange, like love." (118)

--"...reading...was an act of reclamation...the way to make my life my own." (119)