Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

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.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.

I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there's always something new to discover.

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

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

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

A good book is an event in my life.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

If you're going to visit and re-visit a book, it has more reason to be a real book, because of that ability to concentrate and that relationship that you build up with it, as opposed to the relationship that you build up with your screen, rewards replacement.

My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.

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

When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad