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

Robertson Davies Architecture Books Perspective Reading Rereading

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

Pamela Paul Book Clubs Bookish Bookishness Books Readers Reading Rereading

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 Haddon Spurgeon

Charles Haddon Spurgeon Books Learning Meditation Motivation Pride Reading Reading Habits Rereading Thought

...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

Anne Fadiman Reading Rereading

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

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Rereading, we find a new book

~ Mason Cooley

Mason Cooley Reading Rereading

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

~ Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman Reading Rereading

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.

~ C.s. Lewis

C.s. Lewis Inklings Lewis Literary Re Reading Reading Rereading Stories Surprise Unliterary

To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.

~ Johnny Rich

Johnny Rich Books Meaning Reader Readers Reading Rereading