The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. — Ursula K. LeGuin
Read for yourself to understand concepts. — Naval Ravikant
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure. — Oliver Herford
Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life. — Louise Rosenblatt
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. — Vladimir Nabokov
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. — John Locke
Short Unread Quotes
He is too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station and reputation. — John Adams
An unread book does nobody any good — Brandon Mull
Uncertain whose the narrowest span,--the clown unread, or half-read gentleman. — John Dryden
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is always the unreadable that occurs. — Oscar Wilde
The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. — Seamus Deane
Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision of a higher dream. — T. S. Eliot
If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times. — Lewis Black
An unread book is just a block of paper. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nothing is more impotent than an unread library. — John Waters
Unread Image Quotes
Unreadable Quotes
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. — Nick Hornby
Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live. — Holmes Rolston III
I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. — Nick Hornby
Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more. — Gabriel Zaid
People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful. — Napoleon Bonaparte
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do. — W. Somerset Maugham
To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death. — Mark Twain
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. — Oscar Wilde
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Unread Books Quotes
Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books. — John Dingell
Not everybody has time to pay attention fully, or not everybody has the time to read a book. Some people refuse to read books, and I'm just an unread book. Open me! — Lil B
There was that special smell made up of paper, ink, and dust; the busy hush; the endless luxury of thousands of unread books. Best of all was the eager itch of anticipation as you went out the door with your arms loaded down with books. — Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book. — Anthony Burgess
As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air. — Maggie Stiefvater
For some Church members the Book of Mormon remains unread. Others use it occasionally as if it were merely a handy book of quotations. Still others accept and read it but do not really explore and ponder it. The book is to be feasted upon, not nibbled (see 2 Nephi 31:20). — Neal A. Maxwell
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. — Julian Barnes
I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders. — Sherman Alexie
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!' — Linda Grant
Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier. — Sherman Alexie
Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the 'Noli me Tangere' and 'El Filibusterismo' are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence? — Ambeth R. Ocampo
Curiosity killed the cat,” Fesgao remarked, his dark eyes unreadable. Aly rolled her eyes. Why did everyone say that to her? “People always forget the rest of the saying,” she complained. “‘And satisfaction brought it back. — Tamora Pierce
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March — Jane Hirshfield
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it. — Maurice Blanchot
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now. — Stendhal
Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance. — A. Edward Newton
And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear. — Neil Gaiman
The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers. — Agnes Repplier
The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. — Oscar Wilde
Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality. — Sarah Silverman
I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things. — Marilynne Robinson
It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life. — Aleksandar Hemon
Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. — Oscar Wilde
Please be SILENT and LISTEN. I am the SCHOOLMASTER and you are in the CLASSROOM. Just like ELEVEN PLUS TWO equals TWELVE PLUS ONE, And even a FUNERAL can be REAL FUN, You will find my DICTIONARY is quite INDICATORY. If you want to read my story, just look... THEN UNREAD. — Pseudonymous Bosch
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book. — Anthony Burgess
I was once told by a very well-respected editor, "Category horror is about good vs. evil, that's all it is." And I thought, "That's why it's no good. That's why I find that stuff unreadable." One is looking for something that's a little more emotionally complex and nuanced. — Peter Straub
I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering. — Pankaj Mishra
It takes me about a week and a half to read the typical book. I don't know how many ten-day spans I have left. Eventually the unread books on my shelves will have to be abandoned, or they will join me on the pyre. The book I'm about to purchase may be among them. We all buy books we won't live to read. — Ken Kalfus
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. — David Mitchell
In Conclusion
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