A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.

My life is a reading list.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.

There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

They're book addicts.

A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

There's a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.

Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.

The problem with a life spent reading is you know too much.

You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

History will always repeat itself, because it makes for good reading. It doesn't have to be truthful or factual, just entertaining with the odd fact thrown in for good measure.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak in one day at the right time. When the readers on a new path to find. So for now I'll continue to drop ink and not worry about what other people think.

There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.

Truths are dangerous," he said."Then why are you writing them in a book?""To catch them between the pages," said Teddy, "and trap them before they disappear.

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.

A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Oh, Sweetie. No one ever gets through their TBR list. For every book you finish, you'll add five more. That's just the way it works.

When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing.

The primary purpose of reading the Bible is not to know the Bible but to know God.

Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not.""I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken."This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

Keep reading! Keep travelling! Keep thinking! And finally you will be there, in the Land of Wisdom where the mind has the power of an eagle’s eye!

The real education never ends.

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.

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.

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

Let All Your Life’s Experiences Lead To More Writing & Encourage More Reading..!

I love words.  I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail.  I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum.  I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over.   In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.

I shall never exchange reading for riches.

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.

In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death.

In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

If people read poetry, they would be happier.

If we read the Scriptures, God will shine in our heart.

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.

Happy be the reader plunged into her book who forgot the world and whom world forgot.

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

To quote French author Francois Mauriac, 'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who your are' is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

Don't be jealous, be agressive. Make 2012 yours!

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

There is a miracle in your mess, don't let the mess make you miss the miracle.

It’s when your plans look dead that God’s resurrection power begins to operate in your life in greater measure

God is not interested in helping you finding out why you are in a mess, He is interested in fixing it.

God always sees me with no make-ups on because He knew how we started.

There must always be an opposition because the enemy always opposes what the Lord has declared.

I would rather have a man chasing JESUS than a house full of stuffs and garrage filled with big cars.

Of what use is my going to church every day and still come home and remain the same? Of what use is my attending the mosques and the next day I enter the mall with knives and start slaughtering people in the name of religion.God is a God of variety. He was not stupid creating all of us different with our uniqueness.His creating us different shows the level of His creativity. He didn't make you white to hate black or vice versa. He made it so that we can cherish and love each other irrespective of our differences just as He loved us with all our flaws and our short comings.Can we forgive those who have offended us? Yes and some will say no but never forget that you are not worthy but God still forgives you even till the last hour of your life.If God can love us against all our atrocities why can't we learn to love one another.Take a look around you, you can only see sad faces. Was that really God's intention for us on earth? Absolutely not. But we have remoulded God's creativity to suit our taste and lifestyles and now we are reaping the fruit of our labour. You should not expect to reap love when you sowed the seed of hatred. What a man sows that he reaps. We sowed on weapons of war and we are yielding war in return. We have sowed on weapons of destruction so why are we asking for peace.If you ask me....I will say let's go back to our source. He has never lost any battle. I am a living witness.

I am amazed upon the many battle that we engage in, be it money, control or matters of the heart, only very few of us knows how to fight in the right way or understand who we are really fighting against. To win any battle you' ve got to have the right strategy and resources because victories don't come by accident.

All the failures in my life freed me from all my fears so that I can succeed.

I am a bit old fashion but I believe in prayer, I believe prayer can move mountain. Prayer might not be our responsibility but it is a good starting place. It can give us heaven's prospectives on human problems. I know we need to do a bit more than pray but that doesn't mean we don't need to pray.

Sometimes what not to do is more important than what to do. Sometimes when you are in crisis, when frustration are high or when you are under pressure, what you don't do is more important than what you do. Don't be afraid. ....

If you never listen, you can't see. The devil has got so many people so disconnected that they cannot even listen or even sense when the Lord is speaking.

Christians we cannot be allowed to be fractured at a time like this. There are more of us, there are more of light in us than in the agents of darkness.

Man's panic does not produce God's power.....sometimes you need to pray before you post on social media.

At a time like this maybe the world is looking at us not just at a miracle crusade or sunday church service but the way we are living. Maybe they want to see whether what our Master left for us worked for us; there is a counter spirit to the spirit of fear, it is the love of God.

This is not the first time that the world has been in a mess but you are still God, you left us on the earth, not only to preach in a building but to be the church beyond the buildings.

Before we can fix the situation, we have to first see the situation, the world can't see straight right now, some are blinded by hatred, rage, fear, scepticism, some are blinded by their pains.We need to pray...pray that God open our eyes to see the problem from the source and not from the surface.You cannot solve a situation that you cannot see correctly.

The agenda of the Media is not to inform you, they don't care about you, they are trying to show you the truth. There are some intelligent Christians but they can't find them and put on the air ...for instance me

There must be something that God knows about fear that we don't know. I am sure He knows that when you are in a state of fear, you can't fix anything. When we are in a state of fear we can't talk about anything reasonable and we can't solve anything. That is the problem because the media throws all lies on us to create fear and we fall for it....Number one Satan's strategy of getting some people trapped.

Be careful the mistake of yesterday always lives with tomorrow.

How about we be the light of Jesus Christ? There are things we tend to forget when fear becomes the driving force. The world is filled with a lot of questions now; what do we do? Who do we elect? How do we fix this? Some people feel powetless in those ways. Helpless, hopeless, confused, overwhelmed.What do we do?My answer: Stop looking for practical advice "don't be afraid " "those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 kings 6:16

I don't want to settle down because God has satisfied me and heard my prayers. I want to stay hungry and thirsty for the things of God.

The presence of crisis does not prove the absence of God. I think in time of crisis Christians should rise up and point to the world on something bigger. The crisis is an opportunity for us to proclaim to the children of darkness what we proclaim in the light.

God always wants us to see things from heaven's prospective. You may not be doing much to your community but what you are is so important. You are significant.

Five minutes after something happened might not be the best time for you to get into your Facebook and tell everybody. Men's panic does not produce God's power.

Conflict is much the same, injustice and inequality is nothing new to our generation only the contest has changed because not only that everyone has opinion but they also have an opportunity to voice it and that is a bit dangerous.

The conflict hasn't gotten worst but the contest has really changed.............

I have the word of God and my bible is very interesting, this book was conceived in battle, Jesus Christ our Saviour was conceived in brokenness, out of barenness to redeem a people who were in bondage to their sin. I know exactly where to go when the people start getting confused, trading lies for truth, buying injustice for justice and even when the media starts to show me the prospectives of the world that I am living in, I have my prospective from the word of God.

I am so happy that I grew up knowing the word of God, the spirit of discernment in me is 24hrs activated, I can differentiate between light and darkness. I put on the amour of God even when the whole world is going to hell, I refuse to join them. The light in me shall overshadow every power of darkness.

All of my life God has allowed me to share prospectives with people who are different. You cannot lead people whose prospective you are not willing to understand.

Surrounded by enemies, surrounded by evil, surrounded by darkness, injustice......."don't be afraid , those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 Kings 6:16

Whenever someone is a threat to the enemy there will be an attack dispatched against that person to try to minimise their effectiveness.

There is power in the word of God if used properly.

There is a remedy and there is a hope but the remedy is not in the political party or in places that will take you away from hope. You better run to God, that is the only place you can find both.

My advice for those of you who felt being marginalised, undervalued and taken for granted; guess what? That is the Arena where God creates Leaders.

I didn't come from a success lineage but I am so glad that my earthly lineage is not my final story because when I gave my life to Jesus twelve years back, God interrupted my story.

Parents never you make church and studying the word of God optional for your children. If they are in your house, get them up, teach them the word of God, the greatest awards, PhD or achievements any child could have is to grow up in the word of God. I and my family are living witness and it is extending to our third generation.

I do not have any trust fund, I have always trusted God for all my funds.

Whenever you are in transition it is always important to choose the words that you use. You call it crises in your life and I call it transition.

All my pains has always increased my sense of purpose.

If God gives you a gift and you don't know what to do with it, it won't make you happy. Some of you God gave a wonderful husband but you can't make a home and some of you God gave a wonderful wife but you can't make a good husband. Some of you can't even unwrap the gift so that you can appreciate it.

Maybe what you need in your life is not the next level of accomplishment or the next level of accumulation but the next level of appreciation for what you have; that will set the stage to make a space for what you will accumulate in the future. ( a bit deep) Simply put thank God for now before setting the goal for tomorrow because if you grow in gifts and didn't grow in gratitude, you have gained nothing.

If you can feed in the presence of your enemies, if you can be blessed under the weight of burdens, when you praise God in pain, it is preparation for provision.

When you do away with God you become your own god, because you recognise no greater power in the universe than yourself.

I have graduated to the extent of not asking what is happening in my life because I trust the maker(God).

I have my priorities and I know my purpose. I do not Praise God because of my pain but I praise Him because of what the pain is producing.

When you praise God in pain, it is preparing you for provision.

The things I call crisis and all the things that were coming after me are all coming to serve the purpose of God in my life.

God made my enemies to serve me in my absence. God made the things that conspired to destroy me feed me into the place that He was preparing for me. I am a big girl and I can handle trouble and my enemies.

When you learn to have the heart of praise in the presence of your enemies, you set the table; if you can work with God in darkness enough depending on the light that He showed you in the last season, you will learn to read your enemies as a sign that it is time to eat. ( a bit deep). Whenever you sense a crisis in your life, note that your harvest is near.

God prepared a table before me in the presence of my insecurity, in the presence of my deficits, in the presence of my addictions, in the presence of my confusions, in the presence of what I have lost, in the presence of the threat that I won't make it, in the presence of my enemies, I am looking straight ahead.

Learn to eat with your enemies all around you but most of all thank God for his presence. Keep your eyes fixed to the presence of God in the presence of your enemies.

I have learned to thank God for what I cannot see, I have learned to trust God with what I cannot.

Do you know that you can be surrounded by all these blessings, all these relationships, goodness, provisions, opportunities? But if you don't know how to turn the blessing into praise, it will turn into pride and your life will never be filled with joy because your heart has holes in it.

Jesus Christ is the source—the only source—of meaning in life. He provides the only satisfactory explanation for why we’re here and where we’re going. Because of this good news, the final heartbeat for the Christian is not the mysterious conclusion to a meaningless existence. It is, rather, the grand beginning to a life that will never end. That same Lord is waiting to embrace and forgive anyone who comes to Him in humility and repentance. He is calling your name, just as He called the name of Pete Maravich. His promise of eternal life offers the only hope for humanity. If you have never met this Jesus, I suggest that you seek spiritual counsel from a Christian leader who can offer guidance. You can also write to me, if that would help. Thanks for reading along with me. I hope to meet you someday. If our paths don’t cross this side of heaven, I’ll be looking for you in that eternal city. By all means, Be there!

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away.

Sometimes the fact that you can't sense God isn't an indication that He is not there. It is just an indication that you are hanging out in the wrong place.The cave is not a physical location, it is a state of mind.

You will always end up in frustration whenever you try to produce outside your purpose.

Sometimes God wraps destiny in what we perceive as just another day. The same day that David's father asked him to go and deliver bread to his brothers in the field was the same day that God used him to bring goliath down. Take every minute in your life serious.

Real faith looks beneath the surface. Real faith knows that faith works sometimes in dark places. Real faith knows that sometimes in order to see a change, you will have to steer through your situation to really see it.

God's perspectives requires persistence. To have God's perspective in the world we live in requires persistence.

If you work by faith and not by sight, you will always see a sign. You have to develop a space of comfort to know that there is a difference between signs and sounds, it means God will tell you that He will make a change in your life but He won't show you anything to demonstrate the change for a little while because He doesn't want your faith to be in the change; He wants your faith to be in the promise, so that when the change is a bit slow in coming, you will know how to trust in Him while you wait for it to come to pass.

Have you ever asked yourself this question "what can God do through me?" The preacher has no platform if the people has no sense of mission.

In dealing with us, God always starts with our motives. What do you want for the people? What does God wants for his people? What do you want Him to do for you; that's is a starting place.

Blind barthimus used his mouth and his feet to affect what wasn't working in his life? What do you use to affect what's not working in your life? God is not interested in your perfection, He is interested in your participation. It is your participation that attracts the presence of God.

Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer.. I think people go because it is a kind of tradition. I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell. Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺. Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags. Some goes just to please their Pastor. Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching. Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship. Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church. Some goes to church because of miracle. Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc.. Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he createdLet me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about.Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you.

I don't just have only the peace of God, I do also have a God who gives peace, not just resources but the revelation of His presence.

Be anxious for no thing, be concerned about the state of your soul and that of your children, be concerned about God's work in the world; these are genuine concern but when it comes to the things in your life.....be not anxious. If God is for us who can be against us?

Don't think because you can't affect something at a great level that God can't use you in a great way. David didn't even train one day with the armies but He won the war. He didn't even have a weapon but he killed a giant.

God wants to use you right where you are with what you have not what you do not have.

We always think that God's presence is always provided to fix our problems but what if God's presence is more about fixing your perspectives? So that you will have a new way to see your problems. If you didn't make your bed before leaving home this morning, no angel is going to make your bed for you, it is still going to be as you left it till you come back.

Some people want to kill goliath but they do not want to attend to sheep. How can God use you to kill giants if you cannot follow simple instructions?

Sometimes we want God to use us to do big things when we would not even want to do the basics.

You don't have to position yourself in front of people to be used by God. You don't have to convince anyone that you are good enough for the voice of God, just be grateful that God chooses who He wills and once He is ready to use you, no devil in hell can stop Him.

You can't disappoint what God has appointed.

If you can't see the assets in you, it will be hard for you to export it to the world. Recognise who you are and the world will recognise you.

People run around looking for millions of likes in their life and on the social media but do you know what? If you get just one true like from just one who loves you the most, it surpasses all other millions. God loves you the most even without make over.

In God's presence I find peace that is much deeper than any disappointment. I will grow and I understand I can't grow myself, that is why I need God and His grace.

We are all planted in God's vineyard and our lives are filled with potentials and purpose and we have all been given the hopes to anchor our lives even in the most disappointed times. So God is waiting to see what you and I will make out of the raw materials that He has given to us. He is waiting to see what we will make out of the discouragement and disappointment. I believe that in those deepest places of disappointment that the greatest grace will manifest.

I am so glad that God's disappointment in me is not greater than his love and I still have a Destiny. I am growing in grace and mercy because that is the only soil that can produce the kind of life that God desires.

God's voice will be heard in the cave but only His visions will be revealed to you on the mountain. (A bit deep). God will always love you and will always speak to you but when you lose your perspective, you won't see his plan.

Some people are disappointed in their life because they are trying to use the tools that God did not authorised them to use in their life, trying to build on a purpose that is not even attached in their personality.

In God’s Kingdom there are no overnight sensations or flash-in-the-pan successes.Anyone who wants to be used of God will experience hidden years in the backside of the desert. During that time the Lord is polishing, sharpening and preparing us to fit into His bow, so at the right time, like “a polished shaft” He can launch us into fruitful service. The invisible years are years of serving, studying, being faithful in another person’s ministry and doing the behind-the-scenes work. The Bible says, ‘God is not unjust; he will not forget your work’ (Hebrews 6:10 NIV 2011 Edition). Be patient; when the time is right He will bring forth the fruit He placed inside you.

now,never mindthe boy who came out of that reading rooma new man,safe in the hope of what was to comein the summers of his life.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.

Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.""Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?""How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...

That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.

I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.

Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses

We are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night. That is how it ends.

Turn the page, your heroine is still there, breathe, relax, life is beautiful: you're in a book!

The reader leaves his mark on the book, as the book leaves its mark on the reader.

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall...And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place - all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see the truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you.

Love does not choose belief, place, time, situations, or race. love happens between two souls.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!

Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family—the first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

a happy birthdaythis evening, I sat by an open windowand read till the light was gone and the bookwas no more than a part of the darkness.I could easily have switched on a lamp,but I wanted to ride the day down into night,to sit alone, and smooth the unreadable pagewith the pale gray ghost of my hand

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.

The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in; they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.

I want to read every book that’s writtenhear every song that was sungI want to gaze at every cloudand hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.