27 Quotes by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them.

Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Reading teaches us receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan....And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Like a giant doomed to eat damsels, Q. must fill a vast daily quota of attention and adulation from varied sources. In a small town he might run out of people, but by keeping in constant motion, he's in no such danger. The only danger is to those suppliers of attention who expect some continuity of response, who fail to understand that for Q. people are an inexhaustible natural resource for his sustenance and delight, like air or water or sunshine.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.