"First reading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of O'Donnel,[221] which has some striking and beautiful passages of situation and description, and in the comic part is very rich and entertaining. I do not remember being so much pleased with it at first. There is a want of story, always fatal to a book the first reading—and it is well if it gets a chance of a second. Alas! poor novel! Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... he has to say, in his own manner to an open mind that seeks only to receive the impressions which the writer wishes to convey. First let the mind and spirit of the writer come into free, full contact with the mind and spirit of the reader, whose attitude at the first reading should be simply receptive. Such reading is the condition precedent to all true judgment of a writer's work. All criticism that is not so grounded spreads as fog over a poet's page. Read, reader, for yourself, without once pausing ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... stated, and the same general character of the person who was the subject of the history preserved, I apprehend that we should feel our minds strongly impressed by this discovery of fresh evidence. We should feel a renewal of the same sentiment in first reading the Gospel of Saint John. That of Saint Mark perhaps would strike us as an abridgment of the history with which we were already acquainted; but we should naturally reflect, that if that history was abridged by such a person as Mark, or by any person of so early ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... youth is of his first reading lesson. He did not know Spanish and made bad work of the story of the "Foolish Butterfly," which his mother had selected, stumbling over the words and grouping them without regard to the sense. Finally Mrs. Rizal took the book from her son and read it herself, translating the tale into ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... were seated at breakfast, the first reading the newspaper, the last glancing over his letters; for Randal had arrived to the dignity of receiving many letters,—ay, and notes, too, three-cornered and fantastically embossed. Egerton uttered an exclamation, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our first reading of the will in town, the observations I made on the foul play which it is evident the excellent creature met with from this abandoned man, and what I said upon the occasion. I am not used to repeat things ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?" ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Philadelphia and the Secretary of the Navy wanted one or more built at Sackett's Harbor, but naval officers and Fulton objected. A bill put before Congress to authorize another half million to build steam batteries passed the first reading January 9, 1815, went to the House February 22, 1815, but the end of the war prevented any ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle
... QUEER QUERIES.—A FIRST READING.—Would some person kindly inform me of a good Recitation for a Smoking Concert? I have been asked to recite "something telling" after the annual banquet of a Club of local Licensed Victuallers. I am thinking of the First Book of Paradise Lost. Or would parts of The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... Spenser, and Dryden were Mr. Pope's great favourites, in the order they are named, in his first reading, till he was about twelve years old."—POPE ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray |
