Re Reading Quotes

So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a ~ Neal Stephenson

In times of struggle, there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe. Don't you have bigger things to do? Reading, let alone re-reading, is the terrain of milquetoasts and mopey spinsters. At life's ugliest junctures the very act of opening a book can smack of cowardly escapism. Who chooses to read when there's work to be done?

Call me a coward if you will, but when the line between duty and sanity blurs, you can usually find me curled up with a battered book, reading as if my mental health depended on it. And it does, for inside the books I love I find food, respite, escape, and perspective. ~ Erin Blakemore

To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.
I'd never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people. ~ C.S. Lewis

How can you be so nice to me and how can you forgive me when I've been such a jerk?"
Maddy appears to think for a moment. "When you are reading a book and you finish a chapter, you don't keep re-reading the chapter you just finished. You move on to the next chapter to see what happens. ~ Stephen Reid Andrews

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. ~ Susan Sontag

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Read with a vengeance, as if the author's life is on trial, because nothing will have such an impact and be a better investment than owning, reading, and re-reading books that will change the way you think, write, and speak. ~ Chris Erzfeld

I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical. ~ Johannes Kepler

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading. ~ Vernon Lee

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist ... But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. ~ Virginia Woolf

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry. ~ Reynolds Price

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was - perhaps rightly - scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. ~ Thomas Keneally

You Can't Start The Next Chapter Of Your Life If You Keep Re-Reading The Last One. ~ Unknown

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Books worth reading are worth re-reading. ~ Holbrook Jackson

So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static. ~ Terri Windling

They say you can't read the next chapter of your life, if you keep re reading the last one. But then every car has a rear-view mirror. ~ Anonymous

A re-read is more leisurely than a first read. I know the plot, after all, I know what happens. I may still cry (embarrassingly, on the train) when re-reading, but I won't be surprised. Because I know what's coming, because I'm familiar with the characters and the world of the story, I have more time to pay attention to them. I can immerse myself in details and connections I rushed past the first time and delight in how they are put together. I can relax into the book. I can trust it completely. I really like that. ~ Jo Walton

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was. ~ Scott Turow

I recently discovered that a friend who was re-reading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Ridge. That's just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead. But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy's Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say fifteen to forty, I havent even read the books I think I've read. I can't tell you how depressing this is. What's the fucking point? ~ Nick Hornby

A good book is like really loved item at a really good restaurant, every time you go there you order it to see if it tastes like you remember, only to find out it is even BETTER than you remembered! ~ K.A Cameron

Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved ~ Milan Kundera

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, ~ Nicholson Baker

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write. ~ Roy Peter Clark

I do still read comics since I started writing for DC, but nowhere near as much as I used to, and I'm finding now that it's becoming harder to read comics as a consumer, so I think I'll have to make the call there and stop reading them. ~ Karen Traviss

I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me. ~ Zane Grey

Nobody read books, but women, parsons and idle people. ~ H.G.Wells

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

They're book addicts. ~ Lemony Snicket

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict. ~ Jasper Fforde

Pity the man who has a favorite restaurant, but not a favorite author. He's picked out a favorite place to feed his body, but he doesn't have a favorite place to feed his mind! ~ Jim Rohn

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of. ~ Paul Auster

I still read the books to-day, but never again shall I read them with that old glory of youthful passion when I harked to the call from over and beyond that whispered me on to win to the mystery at the back of life and behind the stars. ~ Jack London

You wrote this right?" he said. "It tells how to defeat Set."
Thoth unfolded the papyrus pages. "Oh, dear. I hate reading my old work. Look at this sentence. I'd never write it that way now." He patted his lab coat pockets. "Red pen - does anyone have one?"
Isis chafed against my willpower, insisting that we blast some sense into Thoth. One fireball, she pleaded. Just one enormous magical fireball?
I couldn't say I was tempted, but I kept her under control.
"Since when does drool make you powerful? ~ Rick Riordan

I have my own e-reader, but I hardly ever use it. I need to fold down pages and flag passages with sticky notes. I need to experience books, not just read them. I never go anywhere without a book in my bag, and to travel across the ocean, I'd packed more than my fair share. ~ Lauren Morrill

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless. ~ Marguerite Duras

I began thinking that this was a guy who displayed his books the way another guy might display his animal trophies. ~ Adam Rex

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, "So this is the library." There certainly couldn't be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading.

In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks - James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers - struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan's History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy. ~ Lauren Willig

You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading. ~ Saul Bellow

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Will this job allow me to spend time on in-character activities like, for example, reading, strategizing, writing, and researching? Will I have a private workspace or be subject to the constant demands of an open office plan? If the job doesn't give me enough restorative niches, will I have enough free time on evenings and weekends to grant them to myself? ~ Susan Cain

I'm not big on reading directions. I can't do that. I'm just not from that world. ~ Richard Dean Anderson

We passed a small-boat harbor, gleaming white on blue, and a long pier draped with fishermen. Everything was as pretty as a postcard. The trouble with you, I said to myself: you're always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. Written in invisible ink, in blood, in tears, with a black border around them, with postage due, unsigned, or signed with a thumbprint. ~ Ross Macdonald

When Maddie prepared for bed behind her screen that night, she emerged to find the most terrible sight yet.

"Oh, really, Logan. That just isn't fair."
He looked up from his reclines pose in her bedroom chaise longue, his face partly covered behind a book bound in dark green leather. "What?"

"You're reading Pride and Prejudice?"

He shrugged. "I found it on your bookshelf."
Seeing him read any book was bad enough. But her favorite book? This was sheer torture.

"Just promise me something, please," she said.

"What's that?"

"Just promise me that I'm not going to come out from around this screen one night and find you holding a baby." That seemed the only possibility more devastating to her self-control.

"He chucked. "It doesna seem likely."

"Good. ~ Tessa Dare

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye. ~ Amy Tan

Reading cards again? What are they saying tonight, Amma? ~ Kami Garcia

What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away
almost as if the story is altered depending on who's reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that
a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who's doing the changing: the story, or the reader. ~ Jodi Picoult

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. ~ A.S. Byatt

If she pushes you, I thought, at last you will know. All of the reading and thinking you have done has pointed you toward a mystery of unspeakable size, and here it is, Snicket. Here's the dark thing you imagine very late, on very terrible nights. It has been beckoning you since you were a baby, when you emerged from the darkness of the womb. You didn't know it then, but from that moment on you would float toward another darkness, all the mysterious days and all the mysterious nights of your whole mysterious life. Here it is, Snicket. Listen for this mystery that has been stalking you since they first inked your ankle. ~ Lemony Snicket

Trapped on a school bus for an hour each morning and each evening, she devoured book after book. She explored a hundred worlds, indifferent to her peers and the passing of the universe. ~ Danika Stone

Reading those books is all he does these days. I think he's even read some of them twice. What kind of disturbed individual would read the same book twice, I ask you? ~ Derek Landy

Blue had never believed in death until then. Not in a real way. It happened to other people, other families, in other places. It happened in hospitals or automobile crashes or battle zones. It happened
now she remembered Gansey's words outside Gwenllian's tomb
with ceremony. With some announcement of itself. It didn't just happen in the attic on a sunny day while she was sitting in the reading room. It didn't just HAPPEN, in only a moment, an irreversible moment. It didn't happen to people she had always known. But it did. And there would now forever be two Blues: the Blue that was before, and the Blue that was after. The one who didn't believe, and the one who did. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours--in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough.... ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life. ~ Nicole Krauss

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that's powerful. ~ Taylor Swift

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. 'The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory. ~ Robert Pinsky

People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Not reading a beautiful book again because you've already read it, that is, as if you were not visiting a dear friend again because you know him already. ~ Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

Burn the book. It serves you once.
Read the book. Serves you for a lifetime.
Lend the book. It serves for generations to come. ~ Kowtham Kumar K

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books. ~ Stephen Leacock

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences
they are not illiterate
but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them, and form something new. They read James Baldwin or Henry David Thoreau and their primary reaction seems to be, "Okay, now I've ready that. I'm done." As if the only goal in reading was to have looked at every word. ~ Dinty W. Moore

In life you only get what you put in, the same is true for reading. ~ Carmela Dutra