Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

A book is not completed till it's read.

What is reading but silent conversation?

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.