E. W. Howe Quotes

What is reading, but silent conversation.

What is reading but silent conversation?

Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen, And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sound contribute toward me.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Those who hear and do not understand are like the deaf. Of them the proverb says: "Present, they are absent."

Learning to read and write makes little sense if you don't understand what you're reading and writing about. While we may have forgotten, most of our early learning came not from being explicitly taught but from experiencing. Kids aren't born knowing hard and soft, sweet and sour, red and green. When the child experiences those things, s/he transforms them into psychological understandings. When kids play with other kids, they learn about others and about themselves. Learning the basics of our physical and social reality is what early childhood is all about.

James - "Are you paying attention or just trying to make me look like an idoit?" Elizabeth - "Oh, I'm definately paying attention. If you look like an idiot it has nothing to do with me.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

Video games just can't compare with the variety and intensity of reading.

Everyone only hears what he understands.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

For heaven's sake, don't write writing. Write reading!