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.

An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.

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.

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.

An unread book does nobody any good

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.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Uncertain whose the narrowest span,--the clown unread, or half-read gentleman.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

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.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).