Why I Read Quotes

“Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters’ as well as the author’s), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born;”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety”)”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Pride and Prejudice’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Satyr,” he says, “is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present,”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It’s not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else’s world. To find myself in someone else’s words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books