How to Read a Book Quotes

“We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Books won't solve my problems, Harriet.'
'No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Perhaps it's an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly, or maybe we expect so little of men their transgressions don't register the same.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I miss how Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Harriet," he said, "would you care for a glass of wine?"
"Oh, Jesus God, yes."
"I didn't ask before because I thought it might be, uh, inappropriate for the occasion."
"I can think of no occasion," Harriet said, "including funerals, nuclear summits, and parent-teacher meetings, that could not be vastly improved by a full-bodied red.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I used to race through books one after another, but in Book Club Harriet taught us that when you slow down, you notice more, and when you notice more, you feel more. Reading one book makes it part of all the books you've ever read, Harriet said, so she was forever dragging other books into our discussions.

QUESTION: If Gatsby had a brother like Ethan Frome, would he have made the same mistakes?

QUESTION: If Frank and Zooey could speak from the Spoon River graveyard, which one would tell the story, which the "meanwhile"?”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Maybe tears hide away in the body until such time as they can sprout safely. Freely. In the clear.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Harriet sits with my story for a few minutes, the way she sometimes did in Book Club. Let it settle first, she'd tell us. Let it settle before deciding what it's about.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn't exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“DISCUSSION STARTER: If you were God, would you alter the facts for these characters?

DISCUSSION STARTER: Do books change depending on when and where we read them?

DISCUSSION STARTER: Why do people tell stories?”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“My name was Violet Powell. I took a life. I lived and died. Meanwhile, I was loved.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I look like someone at a costume party who nobody can guess what they’re supposed to be.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Harriet Larson had said yes all her life. To her parents. To her teachers. To Lou and the girls. To Corinne and Sophie. She'd said yes to shopkeepers, to doctors, to car salesmen, to Girl Scout leaders, to Mormons on rounds, to hairdressers who wouldn't let her go gray. She'd been raised to say yes, to agree and approve and adapt and accommodate, to step aside as the architect of her own happiness. After Lou's death she vowed to say yes only when that yes belonged to her, solely to her. And so: Yes to college. Yes to teaching. Yes to retirement. Yes without being asked; yes before being asked. Yes to Book Club. Yes to Violet. Yes to the filthy and broken Dawna-Lynn, for whom she was searching out a bright, becoming color from a closet too full of beige. These yesses felt like power, like gateways, like love.
"Frank." She laid her cheek on his chest. "Yes.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“He had little use for God these days, and yet a feeling came over him, so urgent and instructive as to be nearly a physical voice: You belong exactly here, exactly now.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Tomorrow, though: tomorrow was already a wonder-in-progress, a gift unwrapping,”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“These words do not fly off my tongue. These words step out one by one, wearing shoes.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I feel the way I always feel in Book Club. The way I believe we all feel. Safe.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Passer-by,
To love is to find your own soul
Through the soul of the beloved one.

-- quoted from Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I can’t say I loved The Great Gatsby”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“You could’ve told me. I’m not a crier.” This is the whoppiest lie I’ve told in my life.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“To be loved by prickly Sophie was to truly be loved.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“When we gather to talk about books”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“as if the part of God that is said to dwell in all creatures had flown from her, only to perch somewhere nearby, awaiting reentry.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“Violet was heartbroken”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book