400 Quotes About Readers

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.

So you’re a reader,” My mom sighs, as if somehow this elevates Isabel to yet another realm of perfection.

A book can allow a reader to do nothing or to do everything.

I still sometimes encounter readers from the South who speak to me of the book's impact on them when it first fell into their hands in an Istanbul shantytown, a Greek port, the slums of Madrid, Damascus or Bombay. In these different places the book had an intimate address. It was no longer a sociological (or even political at the first degree) treatise but, rather, a little book of life stories, a sequence of lived moments — such as one finds in a family photo album. [From the Preface]

When someone tells me to 'just relax,' I wonder why they don’t hand me a book?

Its not over when the curtains come down, its over when YOU choose not to perform anymore.

It takes courage to knowingly read a book that is challenging some of your cherished beliefs.