Rereading Quotes

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies

“Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“...sometimes when you really like a book, you need to read it again! To relive what you loved and find out what you missed before. Books always change as the person who reads them changes too.”
― Sara Nisha Adams, The Reading List

“...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.”
― Anne Fadiman, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love

“To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.”
― William Golding

“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been consumed ("devoured"), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ("this happens before or after that") and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to "explicate," to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different).”
― Roland Barthes

“I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption—vain because it is endless—and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.”
― Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't

“He asked if I had liked the book in English. I wondered whether to lie.
"No," I said. "Maybe I should read it again."
"Uh-huh," Ivan said. "So that's how it works for you?"
"How what works?"
"You read a book and don't like it, and then you read it again?”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“This book is for those that found love when everyone thought they were too young to know what it was.
We should all be lucky enough to find our forever so soon.”
― Alexa Riley, Shielding Lily

“Don’t you ever reread a book you liked?” Once the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them; there were plenty of people who didn’t read for pleasure, let alone reread.
But Tom smiled and shook his head. “I used to, when I was a tyke. But how can you read a book you’ve already read when you know there are all those other ones out there?”
“An excellent argument, Mr. McLaury. I can only defend my position by saying that I use my old books as seasoning for the new ones—I sprinkle them lightly through my reading.”
― Emma Bull, Territory

“Rereading, we find a new book”
― Mason Cooley

“…it’s very likely that the sentences I’ll underline in future will be different from the sentences I underlined in the past, when I was in Tangier—you don’t ever step into the same book twice after all.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“Those who cannot understand what they've read should probably reread it.”
― Gene Ambaum

“Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I’ve put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there.

-- "On Rereading," NYRB July 14, 2005”
― Larry McMurtry

“Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before.”
― Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

“Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“That is what makes us love beautiful things: they have a perennial appeal, and hearing about them a second and third time can be even better than the first. The first time you hear it but not all of it. When you hear it again you savor every detail. Thus, when Avraham David spoke about our Master, the distinguished Av Beit Din, he would go on and on about things we already knew, but both the speaker and the listener felt as if they were only now hearing the real gist of it for the first time.”
― S.Y. Agnon, A City in Its Fullness

“When I was a kid, I heard a story about half of all marriages end in divorce. At that time, it was a story about my parents. Twenty years later, I heard the same story — that half of all marriages end in divorce. Then, it was a story about my wife and I. Today, I heard the same story again — that half of all marriages end in divorce. Now, it’s a story about my kids. I heard that same exact story three times — the same exact words — but each time I heard it, it was a completely different story. It changed because I changed.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“I am a very ‘unvoracious’ reader, and since I can seldom bring myself to read a work twice I think of the many things that I read – too soon! Nothing, not even a (possible) deeper appreciation, for me replaces the bloom on a book, the freshness of the unread. Still what we read and when goes, like the people we meet, by ‘fate.’

Letter 189
From a letter to Mrs M. Wilson”
― Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
― Doris Lessing

“Mi domandò se in inglese il libro mi era piaciuto. Valutai se dirgli la verità.
-No,- gli dissi. -Forse dovrei rileggerlo.
-Ah, vedi,- disse Ivan. -Quindi per te funziona così?
-Funziona così cosa?
-Leggi un libro, non ti piace, e allora te lo rileggi di nuovo?”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“If rewriting equals rereading, we must logically conclude that writing is reading. If this is indeed the case, how could we possibly write under a ban on reading? The only way left is mouth-to-mouth – poets and storytellers recite their pieces and before we can commit them to memory, everything vanishes into thin air.”
― Kyoko Yoshida

“She hadn't been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit -and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“You will find that most books worth reading once are worth reading twice.”
― John Morley

“I think of a second reading of a book as completing my read, a first reading is preliminary and reactions to a first reading are suspect.”
― Jo Walton, What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy

“Rereading does not lend itself to imperialistic interpretations that assume command of textual territory in the name of some over-riding truth. On the contrary, rereading insists on multiplicity of meaning, predicted as it is on awareness of the different revelations implicit in different encounters with a single book. (page 84)”
― Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading

“...rereading works that I originally read, for pleasure, in the excited atmosphere of contemporaneity, [I] have reread them purposefully to assess their power, given the passage of time. (pg. 127)”
― Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading