Wallace Stevens Quotes

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

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

God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.

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.

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Being that can be understood is language.

I think understanding or comprehension is probably the strongest emotion that you feel, or at least some kind of empathy.

A lot of the times you read something and you don't realize that you are going to have to do the things that you read.

I think that you really get what you recognize is in the universe.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.