Librera Reader Quotes

If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them. When you can get rid of a piece of writing just by clicking on a few links, there's a temptation to believe that it's less serious. But it isn't. It's just less clear what you've done. ~ G.R. Reader

An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. ~ Thomas Sowell

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss. ~ Michael Cunningham

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence. ~ Harold Bloom

Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties. ~ Evariste Galois

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind - the impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So ... a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be. ~ Terry Pratchett

For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Reading to understand and writing to be understood. ~ Jill Telford

I don't wait for inspiration. Writing is my job. ~ Gail Carson Levine

I've always been into having stories told to me. I was a voracious reader, my father was also a teller of tales; and the kind of Baron Munchausen proxy of a tall tale was much more interesting than a true tale. ~ Damon Lindelof

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

I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun. ~ Steven Pressfield

Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The imagination gland doesn't die. It just becomes reliant on manufactured spirit. ~ S.A. Tawks

And watch out for the blade, Constant Reader. It is a Stephen King story, after all. ~ Stephen King

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. ~ Joseph Conrad

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. ~ Walter Benjamin

Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely. ~ Bob Smith

It's always the end of the world," said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. "You could set your watch on it arriving." He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," he said. "Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity." Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011 ~ Russell Grandinetti

Dear reader, if you have ever had to tromp around on a hot golf course for hours, lugging someone else's ungainly golf bag filled with long metal objects, then you too would most likely prefer lying in the shade, half-listening to rich boys complain, instead. ~ Jon Skovron

What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn't want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the '80s and a man in the audience, asked me: 'Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn't say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.' And I said, 'No, I didn't.' It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach. ~ Norman Manea

I am as interested in seeing what happens to my characters as any reader; that is why I tell kids that writers write for the same reason readers read - to find out the end of the story. ~ Ann Turner

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important. ~ Gary Provost

To find out what a story's really about,' the Librarian said, 'You don't ask the writer. You ask the reader. ~ Emily Winfield Martin

Whether or not you employ humor in dealing with difficult subjects, the tone of the writing is of the utmost importance. Personally, I can read about almost any subject if I feel a basic trust in, and respect for, the writer. The voice must have authority. But more than that, I must know that the writer is all right. If she describes a suicide attempt or a babysitter's cruelty to her, or a time of acute loneliness, I need to feel that the writer, not the character who survived the experience, is in control of telling the story....The tone of such pieces may be serious, ironic, angry, sad, or almost anything except whiny. There must be no hidden plea for help - no subtle seeking of sympathy. The writer must have done her work, made her peace with the facts, and be telling the story for the story's sake. Although the writing may incidentally turn out to be another step in her recovery, that must not be her visible motivation: literary writing is not therapy. Her first allegiance must be to the telling of the story and I, as the reader, must feel that I'm in the hands of a competent writer who needs nothing from me except my attention. ~ Judith Barrington

We always for better or worse try to put on paper what's going up on screen - whether we're directing it or not. It's really just an extension of that habit which is trying to tell the reader what the movie will look like. Ultimately that is the job of a screenwriter to a certain extent. ~ John Francis Daley

Every reader can live One Thousand and One Lives; every fiction author can have One Thousand and One Masks, and their talent can have One Thousand and One Facets. ~ Lara Biyuts

I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader. ~ Thom Gunn