Readers Quotes

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
― Mary Gaitskill

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“And she is the reader
who browses the shelf
and looks for new worlds
but finds herself.”
― Laura Purdie Salas, BookSpeak!: Poems about Books

“What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them.”
― Tara Bray Smith

“The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.”
― Thomas Mann

“Books are a portable kind of time travel. We go back as well as forward when we read them. When we come back into the now, after being immersed in worlds previously unknown to us, we find ourselves, transformed. Touched by their magic, nothing we ever perceived beforehand remains quite the same.”
― Suzy Davies

“Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults

“A reader takes poetry deep within him or her by accommodating it within his/her range of consciousness. So there is a possibility that the poems are received and understood differently when they enter into readers’ sphere.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award”
― Kate DiCamillo

“Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.”
― Jim Butcher, Small Favor

“We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“I'm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps.”
― Walter Mosely

“To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom. ”
― Tom Bissell

“Within the pages of books, I've journeyed to Mandalay, the Milky Way and Santa Fe, without once having to leave my armchair.”
― Kevin Ansbro

“Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race.”
― Aman Jassal, Rainbow - the shades of love

“All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.”
― Tara Bray Smith