Voracious Reader Quotes

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INTERVIEWER Have you ever been envious of another writer? WODEHOUSE No, never. I’m really such a voracious reader that I’m only too grateful to get some stuff I can read.
P.G. Wodehouse
I have never met a mentally strong person who wasn’t a voracious reader.
James Altucher (The Rich Employee)
Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books ready long ago.
Maria Popova (Figuring)
Mystery readers were everywhere, voracious, highly partisan, and passionate. They were among the store’s best customers, and unfailingly polite. In private they embraced a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance and the use of arcane poisons and sneaky sleuthing, but in public they were charming and generous. Romance readers tended to be fun and have strong opinions. Nonfiction readers asked a lot of questions and were easily amused. It was the serious novel folks and poetry fans you had to watch out for.
Abbi Waxman (The Bookish Life of Nina Hill)
The best writers are usually the most voracious & diverse readers!
Chris S. Dixon -writer
I was a voracious reader, but part of what that taught me was that I was nowhere near as scholarly as I wanted to be. I was precocious, but how many years beyond your teens can you be called that with sincerity?
Carrie Fisher (The Princess Diarist)
He was mocked by his critics for being an empty suit, yet he was a careful, studious chief executive—a voracious reader and talented writer who often left his speechwriters in awe.
Bret Baier (Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Three Days Series))
I was a voracious reader and what I had learned in books confirmed that the world changes constantly and humanity evolves, but the changes are only obtained after much struggle.
Isabel Allende (The Soul of a Woman)
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami
She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.
Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
The best speakers are voracious readers. Reading is like priming the pump. If we only rely on our own imagined creativity and genius, we will soon be out of material and out of work. Creativity is really at its peak when we are stimulated by the thoughts and work of others.
Ken Davis (Secrets of Dynamic Communications: Prepare with Focus, Deliver with Clarity, Speak with Power)
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement! The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.
Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra)
Quote from Louise Penny a Canadian author. Wrote “How The Light Gets In” from an interview. “Having started as a voracious reader (and I still am), I know that reading is as creative as writing. The writer suggests, creates a character, a setting, an atmosphere. But it’s the reader who brings it alive. Walks with the characters, sees the world, smells the wood smoke, tastes the café au lait and feels the biting cold on the tender cheek
Louise Penny
Palgolak was a god of knowledge. ... He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information. ... Palgolak's library ... did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or night, and there were very, very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter into their library.
China Miéville
You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.
M.J. Nicholls (The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die)
Although only seven, she’d been reading since she was three, a fact her mother told anyone who would listen. Sarah was a voracious reader, and she’d found friends hiding between the pages of books. For her, the trips to the library meant more than the refreshing burst of air-conditioning. They were life.
Karen Hawkins (The Book Charmer (Dove Pond #1))
Eric dubbed his pranks “the missions.” As they got under way, he ruminated about misfit geniuses in American society. He didn’t like what he saw. Eric was a voracious reader, and he had just gobbled up John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, which includes a fable about the idiot savant Tularecito. The young boy had extraordinary gifts that allowed him to see a world his peers couldn’t even imagine—exactly how Eric was coming to view himself, though without Tularecito’s mental shortcomings. Tularecito’s peers failed to see his gifts and treated him badly. Tularecito struck back violently, killing one of his antagonists. He was imprisoned for life in an insane asylum. Eric did not approve. “Tularecito did not deserve to be put away,” he wrote in a book report. “He just needed to be taught to control his anger. Society needs to treat extremely talented people like Tularecito much better.” All they needed was more time, Eric argued—gifted misfits could be taught what was right and wrong, what was acceptable to society. “Love and care is the only way,” he said.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
Papi was a voracious reader, couldn't even go cheating without a paperback in his pocket.
Junot Díaz (Drown)
Market research shows that Haribo gummies are the leading candy consumed by voracious readers.
Elisabeth Egan (A Window Opens)
Though Amelie was a voracious reader of romantic novels, she was painfully shy around men in whom she found an interest.
Nancy Campbell Allen (The Matchmaker's Lonely Heart (Matchmakers, #1))
My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.
Rigoberto González (Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad: Autobiographical Voices of U.S. Latinos/as))
Being a reader is how I choose to spend my life, every aspect of it, inside and outside of the classroom. I often wonder whether my identity as a reader, someone who reads voraciously and always has a book recommendation, is all I have to offer. That may be true, but it is an oversimplification. How can I express the extent to which reading has shaped who I am as a human being? Although I see myself as kind, I am not a demonstrative person. If I have ever brought you a book unasked for, know that I cared. I said everything to you that I wanted with that book. I have enough wisdom to acknowledge that an author’s words are more eloquent than my own. When we meet and I discover that we have read and loved the same books, we are instant friends. We know a great deal about each other already if we both read. I imagine this is why I strive so hard to get people around me to read. If you don’t read, I don’t know how to communicate with you. I know this is a shortcoming. Perhaps my mother, who worried that reading would make me socially stunted, was half right. I can never express who I really am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.
Donalyn Miller
Realizing that your emotions and experiences aren't yours alone is one of the great powers of reading.
Cara Nicoletti (Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books)
At some point, even the most voracious of readers needs to pull the plug and stop the constant drip of facts, figures, and meaningless Internet fights.
Devon Price (Laziness Does Not Exist)
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule to never touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading a book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added," but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle — to which he was hopelessly addicted.
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
voracious reader, and it dawned on her that a corporate job in Tampa or Jacksonville was not, in fact, the be-all and end-all. Something lay beyond that point. Florence had haunted the library, desperate for glimpses of lives unlike her own. She had a penchant for stories about glamorous, doomed women like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer. Soon, however, her fascination shifted from the women in the stories to the women who wrote them. She devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who were far more glamorous and doomed than any of their characters. But without a doubt, Florence’s Bible was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Admittedly, she spent more time scrolling through photos of Joan Didion in her sunglasses and Corvette Stingray than actually reading her, but the lesson stuck. All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame. When she looked into the future, she saw herself at a beautiful desk next to a window, typing her next great book. She could never quite see the words on the screen, but she knew they were brilliant and would prove once and for all that she was special. Everyone would know the name Florence Darrow. And who’d trade that for a condo?
Alexandra Andrews (Who Is Maud Dixon?)
It’s easy to be deceived into believing that “the more I know the more I am.” I meet many voracious readers with a desire to be brilliant that is often stronger than their desire to practice. We tremble at the thought of being stuck on the tarmac because we know less than the peers we compare ourselves to. This type of thinking lures us into a learning formula that cultivates duplicity. The separation between information and immersion has sundered our rootedness as the people of God.
Dan White Jr. (Subterranean)
What I know now, having lost both of my child hood dogs, is the the grief of losing a beloved pet - especially one that has been in the family for many years - is as much about recognizing the passing of time and the closing of chapters as it is about mourning companionship.
Cara Nicoletti (Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books)
What would you like to read tonight?” he says. This too has become routine. So far I’ve been through a Mademoiselle magazine, an old Esquire from the eighties, a Ms., a magazine I can remember vaguely as having been around my mother’s various apartments while I was growing up, and a Reader’s Digest. He even has novels. I’ve read a Raymond Chandler, and right now I’m halfway through Hard Times, by Charles Dickens. On these occasions I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
It all began in 1919 when ex-Marxist Benito Mussolini wrote the Fascist Party platform, calling for central planning through a “partnership” of government, business, and labor. By 1925 he was in total power. Not all of Mussolini’s admirers were in Italy. The cover story of the New York Times Magazine for October 24, 1926, gushed: The most approachable as well as the most interesting statesman in Europe. He is a voracious learner who never makes the same mistake twice. . . . The whole country is keyed up by his energy. . . . The whole economic structure of the nation has been charted out in a graph that shows it as a huge corporation with the Government as the directorate. He explains it clearly and patiently, reminding you that he started his career as a teacher. An earlier New York Times editorial (October 31, 1922) had explained: In Italy as everywhere the great complaint against democracy today is its inefficiency. . . . Neither the failures nor the successes of (Russia’s) Bolshevist Government offer much of an example to the Western world. Dr. Mussolini’s experiment will perhaps tell us something more about the possibilities of oligarchic administration.
Ludwig von Mises (The Free Market Reader (LvMI))
Hardy reinforces his narrative with stories of heroes who didn’t have the right education, the right connections, and who could have been counted out early as not having the DNA for success: “Richard Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. Steve Jobs was born to two college students who didn’t want to raise him and gave him up for adoption. Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then got a job in software sales from which he was fired.”8 The list goes on. Hardy reminds his readers that “Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer. Retired General Colin Powell was a solid C student. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was born in a housing authority in the Bronx … Barbara Corcoran started as a waitress and admits to being fired from more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, was sickly as a child and finished high school two years late due to medical complications. He never went to college.” What do each of these inspiring leaders and storytellers have in common? They rewrote their own internal narratives and found great success. “The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important,”9 writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero. Matthews reminds his readers that young John F. Kennedy was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his youth. And what did he do while setting school records for being in the infirmary? He read voraciously. He read the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to take the stage, Jack was ready.
Carmine Gallo (The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't)
Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.
Richard Davenport-Hines (Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes)
A voracious reader with a large memory for what she read,
Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray (Jane Austen For Dummies)
Golu would eagerly wait for the drifting paper boats. He was a voracious reader. #boat by prachi manohar
Various (Terribly Tiny Tales: Volume 1)
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds.
Reif Larsen (I Am Radar: A Novel)
I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah’s death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like “Books are the air I breathe,” or, worse, “Life is meaningless without literature,” all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book.
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she’d be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.
Helen Oyeyemi (Gingerbread)
Captivity of the Oatman Girls was published at a perfect moment for success—particularly for a female audience. It appeared at the height of the industrial revolution, when women were reading more because of increased education for girls, lower birthrates, and lighter domestic workloads, thanks to new technology. Middle-class women were becoming voracious readers not only because they were better schooled but also because they were trapped: their domestic responsibilities were reduced by manufacturing, yet they were confined to the home.
Margot Mifflin (The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West))
voracious reader,
J.A. Jance (Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady, #19))
Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.
Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
Looking back, Rohde saw his chief asset in developing the park not as his design or artistic skills but the liberal arts education he’d gotten at Occidental College. He was a voracious reader and a habitual synthesizer of seemingly unrelated concepts
Leslie Iwerks (The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (Disney Editions Deluxe))
I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
Second, Buffett ran a highly concentrated portfolio, occasionally investing more than 20% of his fund in a single investment idea. Great investment ideas are rare; Buffett seized on them whenever he uncovered them. Third, Buffett was a tenacious and creative researcher, traveling extensively to learn about companies and industries, pushing his understanding of business beyond what he could learn from the documents. While he was certainly a voracious reader, he also applied similar ferocity to uncovering information through people. Fourth, Buffett possessed a remarkable filter. His ability to sift through investment opportunities quickly, something he has honed throughout his career, allowed him to seize on the best ideas and concentrate
Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
A person living in poverty can find themselves aging faster, a victim of many illnesses and many will discover they are not using their minds to the best potential because of depression or simply acceptance of their situation.Yet, Poverty can also be a substance to strengthen one's resolve to improve their situation. It can make you a voracious reader to educate yourself beyond where you are and beyond what your environment say's you can become. Poverty can make a person creative and industrious in finding ways to solve problems that others would simply ignore or those with financial means would purchase from stores or hire the assistance of the skilled. Poverty is not a blessing but it can make a person wiser and more appreciative. It can garner gratitude and make you humble. It can definitely make you more determined to have the best life you possibly can and can empower you ethically and morally.
Levon Peter Poe
All my life I have been faced with the singular opportunity to have NOTHING! I changed that by facing the fact that education, even if unaffordable to me, is something I can have. That is what made me a voracious reader. I learn what I am curious about. I research to understand what I want to know. And I probably have more degrees of education learned on my own than the people who pay for school or receive free degrees. I am self-taught and have been blessed to know NO LIMITS to my minds capacity of intellectual pursuits. The rich and the well off can have a piece of paper show they achieved a discipline or been given a gift of knowledge. I have the school of life, I have survived and instituted all I know to prove to myself and the world a new singularity - I CAN! ~ Levon Peter Muhammad Salah Setyowan Poe
Levon Poe
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Reif Larsen (I Am Radar)
That's just where I must part company with you, Inspector,” said the Vicar with a gentle smile. “I'm rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and it's always struck me that the detective in fiction is inclined to underrate the value of intuition.
John Bude (The Cornish Coast Murder)
As a nine-year-old, Pauling was such a voracious reader that his father wrote a letter to the Portland Oregonian asking for book recommendations for his son. “Please don’t suggest the Bible and Darwin’s The Origin of Species,” the elder Pauling wrote, “because he’s already read these books.
David S. Kidder (The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities (The Intellectual Devotional Series))
You are the salt of the earth….” —Matthew 5:13 (NRSV) FRIENDSHIP THROUGH BOOKS I met Bill years earlier when he’d joined the St. James Literary Society, a book and discussion group at New London, Connecticut’s homeless shelter. Bill was what we used to call a “rag man,” one who collected bottles and other castoffs to sell or give away. He always had a shopping cart crammed with stuff. Initially, he fought my friendship with the tenacity that only a street person possesses; to survive, Bill believed he could love no one and allow no one to love him. I lured him and other shelter residents with their love of books. I'd learned from volunteering that many homeless people enjoy reading; books provided an escape. Bill was a voracious reader. We found nearly one thousand tattered books in his apartment after he died, most purchased for a few cents. Although he preferred books to people, eventually he began talking. But are our meetings making any difference in his life, I wondered. Then, one night, we were discussing childhood memories, and Bill told us he’d been a Boy Scout, had earned a service badge for collecting eyeglasses. I teased, “Too bad I have to drag these things out of you.” He didn’t laugh. Instead, he met my eyes directly—a rare occurrence—and said, “Until this group, I wouldn’t have told anyone these things.” And then I was the wordless one. Lord, I praise You for giving me the opportunity to love and be loved. —Marci Alborghetti Digging Deeper: Mt 5:1–20
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
What kind of reader were you as a child? Slow, but voracious (like now). Utterly indiscriminate (unlike now).
Richard Russo
Our great teacher, Elvin Semrad, actively discouraged us from reading psychiatry textbooks during our first year. (This intellectual starvation diet may account for the fact that most of us later became voracious readers and prolific writers.) Semrad did not want our perceptions of reality to become obscured by the pseudocertainties of psychiatric diagnoses.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
I'm sometimes afraid to admit that I was never a voracious reader. I didn't absorb books by the shelf full. At times, I was a very attentive and careful reader, but never at the level of my peers. For me, getting through a paragraph was like swimming through razorwire. I started writing as a way to save face.
Connor de Bruler (Fresh Anthology)
Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind. His grandfather would take him to the library, which had a huge collection of science fiction books. Over the summers Jeff worked his way through the shelves, reading hundreds of them. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein became his favorites, and later in life he would not only quote them but also occasionally invoke their rules, lessons, and lingo.
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.
Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)
Warren was probably the most avid reader who ever ran the library. She believed librarians' single greatest responsibility was to read voraciously. Perhaps she advocated this in order to be sure librarians knew their books, but for Warren, this directive was based in emotion and philosophy: She wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite. As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, librarians should "read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they'd rather do it than anything else in the world.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
Over the next few weeks, Watts became a voracious reader of murder books by authors such as Margaret Truman and Brad Thor.
John Glatt (The Perfect Father: The True Story of Chris Watts, His All-American Family, and a Shocking Murder)
If Bolívar’s increasing melancholy by the 1820s appears particularly marked (‘the only thing one can do in America’, he wrote morosely towards the end of the decade, ‘is emigrate’), this was in part because he had fought too hard for too long, and because he was a man who luxuriated in words. But it was also the case that, from the outset, Bolívar – who was as much a voracious reader as Napoleon – had devoted serious thought to the question of what kinds of political systems might effectually replace Spanish imperial rule in South America while also guaranteeing order and stability.
Linda Colley (The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World)
A person living in poverty can find themselves aging faster, a victim of many illnesses and many will discover they are not using their minds to the best potential because of depression or simply acceptance of their situation. Yet, Poverty can also be a substance to strengthen one's resolve to improve their situation. It can make you a voracious reader to educate yourself beyond where you are and beyond what your environment say's you can become. Poverty can make a person creative and industrious in finding ways to solve problems that others would simply ignore or those with financial means would purchase from stores or hire the assistance of the skilled. Poverty is not a blessing but it can make a person wiser and more appreciative. It can garner gratitude and make you humble. It can definitely make you more determined to have the best life you possibly can and can empower you ethically and morally.
Levon Peter Poe
A voracious reader of business books and a prolific writer, Weinzweig turned out long papers on Zingerman’s application of concepts like “stewardship” and “entrepreneurial management.” He then worked with the ZingTrain people to reduce those concepts to a series of steps, points, definitions, and compacts, thereby turning the ideas into management tools. “What we look for is elegant simplicity,” he said. “We want to make each one something that anyone can understand and use.
Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big)
Typically As have a lot less time to learn beyond the job than Cs. The Cs that I have met have been voracious readers, dedicated students, obsessive observers, all keen to stay alert, enhance their expertise, challenge their thinking, improve themselves.
Richard Hytner (Consiglieri - Leading from the Shadows: Why Coming Top Is Sometimes Second Best)
Despite the demanding nature of his schedule, Lee is a voracious reader. "I read everywhere," he says. "I have a great reading chair, and I read in bed- a terrible habit for my neck and my eyes. But I find it calming: It's a different part of my brain, unlike the way I take in other media, and I think I retain information better.
Nina Freudenberger (Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books)
Mystery readers were everywhere, voracious, highly partisan, and passionate. They were among the store’s best customers, and unfailingly polite. In private they embraced a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance and the use of arcane poisons and sneaky sleuthing, but in public they were charming and generous.
Abbi Waxman (The Bookish Life of Nina Hill)
My late husband and I started our sons off as readers at a very young age. Today, they are voracious readers.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
IDEAS ARE FOOD What he said left a bad taste in my mouth. All this paper has in it are raw facts, half-baked ideas, and warmed-over theories. There are too many facts here for me to digest them all. I just can’t swallow that claim. That argument smells fishy. Let me stew over that for a while. Now there’s a theory you can really sink your teeth into. We need to let that idea percolate for a while. That’s food for thought. He’s a voracious reader. We don’t need to spoon-feed our students. He devoured the book. Let’s let that idea simmer on the back burner for a while. This is the meaty part of the paper. Let that idea jell for a while. That idea has been fermenting for years.
George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By)
It did make sense. Books were among Jackie’s great loves; she was a voracious consumer and reader of them, and aside from her children, books were her solace, her emotional sustenance. And editing would fit with her baseline personality: Jackie was social and loved meeting new and fascinating people, but she was also, at her core, a loner. Becoming an editor would mean lunches and book launches and office work, but it would also allow her hours away on her own, reading and thinking and refueling.
Maureen Callahan (Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed)