Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I love books that stand the test of time.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

Favorite books and authors while growing up - I'd need a book to list them all. For the sake of brevity: Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, world's mythology, the Arthurian legends. And the unabridged dictionary. And they're still my favorites. They get better each time I read them.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.