Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.

Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

When you read a great book at one point in your life then in another part of your life, when you read the same book, it's like it was just written because now what you bring to the experience is so much richer.