Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
In fact I have a full page warning, right in the front of the book, that no one under the age of eighteen should read this book and no one should even turn the pages if they are sexually conservative or erotically deprived.
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
At the age of 12, I developed an intense interest in mathematics. On exposure to algebra, I was fascinated by simultaneous equations and read ahead of the class to the end of the book.
Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions. For God alone reads our hearts.
If we read the Bible asking first, 'What would Jesus do?' instead of asking 'What has Jesus done,' we'll miss the good news that alone can set us free.
Weird people follow you in the streets, you can't sit alone in a restaurant or a cafe and read a book in peace, and I think everybody values those moments of being alone.
President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. Isn't that amazing? Yes, and get this, not only that, President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003.
There's such an array of brilliant roles for young women. You read all these amazing young women going through different stages in their life - different stages, different fascinations, different textualities, different friendships.
The other day I was reading a blog and I linked over to Streisand's Web site, and it was amazing politically. She's so insightful and incisive. And she also says whatever she wants.
My grandmother was this amazing woman in the Dominican Republic who used to read tea leaves and palms. She would cure people in her neighborhood by going into her garden, plucking a couple of leaves, and brewing teas.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.
Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.
