Robert Henri Quotes

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

The Catcher in the Rye had such a deep impact on me, because it felt like it was just Holden and me. I didn't feel like any other person had read that book. It felt like my secret. Writing that I identify with feels like it's just me and the writer. So I hope that whoever is reading what I do feels like that.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

A lot of people have told me, you know, that what I've written about, they identify with strongly.

A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet too!

I guess quotes make me feel more connected.