Home > Work > Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books
1 " I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now? "
― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books
2 " 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. "
3 " How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer. "
4 " Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued...was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment. "
5 " 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. "
6 " Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words. "
7 " Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. "
8 " In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life. "
9 " Yet when we do manage to create ourselves anew, isn’t there always a suspicion that the new identity fits over the old like a second skin, at times itchy or uncomfortably tight, not quite covering the most vulnerable patches? "
10 " Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides. "
11 " 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. "
12 " Lying in the shadow of books, I brood on my reading habit. What is it all about? What am I doing it for? And the classic addict’s question, What is it doing for me? "
