Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

Property is robbery! That is the war-cry of '93! That is the signal of revolutions!
Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition. I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble of our future constitution. This proposition which seems to you blasphemous — property is robbery — would, if our prejudices allowed us to consider it, be recognized as the lightning-rod to shield us from the coming thunderbolt; but too many interests stand in the way! … Alas! philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

It has been well remarked of the poems of Hafiz, that their refreshing influence does not depend so much on the sense of the words as on the tone of mind produced in the reader.

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben

Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?

Anthony Daniels

Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.

Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Charlotte Brontë

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

I thought if I can still be the central voice but without having an 'I' there, and by not having it there, it makes it easier for the reader to slip into the consciousness of the narrator. If you remove the letter 'I' it becomes a universal I. Everybody is the author walking down those streets while they are in the prose.

What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.

Man's life is like unto a winter's day,—
Some break their fast and so depart away;
Others stay dinner, then depart full fed;
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, then behold and see!
As we are now, so must you be.

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.

If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.

Gregory Bateson

I think Miss Moore was right to cut The Steeple-Jack — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it? No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

Randall Jarrell

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Hunter S. Thompson

They're often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends — both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature — Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad — the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

James J. Kilpatrick

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Alberto Manguel

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way.