Cornel West Quotes

Books never pall on me. They discourse with us, they take counsel with us, and are united to us by a certain living chatty familiarity. And not only does each book inspire the sense that it belongs to its readers, but it also suggests the name of others, and one begets the desire of the other.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.

As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie.

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

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.

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.