Reader Quotes

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
― Margaret Fuller

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”
― Anne Fadiman

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Dear friend, You are not a freak. You are wanted. You are necessary. You are the only you there is. Don’t be afraid to leave the castle. It’s a great big world out there. Love, a fellow reader”
― Jennifer Niven, Holding Up the Universe

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.”
― David Almond

“Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.

Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.”
― Susan Cain

“We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.”
― Alberto Manguel

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun.”
― Kevin Smokler, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: A Collection of All Original Essays from Today's (and Tomorrow's) Young Authors on the State of the Art -- ... Hustle -- in the Age of Information Overload

“What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

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

“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

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

“Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“No happiness in the writer, no happiness in the reader.”
― Gabrielle Dubois

“Some people see a bookshop as an archive, or a shrine, or even a time machine. But I think a bookshop is like a map of the world. There are infinite paths you can take through it and none of them are right or wrong. Here in a bookshop we give readers landmarks to help them find their way, but every reader has to learn to set their own compass.”
― Anna James, Tilly and the Bookwanderers

“I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. ”
― Tara Bray Smith

“Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone”. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

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

“But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination.”
― Jodi Picoult, Off the Page

“Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.”
― Georges Bataille