Quotes About Unread

#1. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.

Carl Becker

#2. Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

Marie Rutkoski

#3. The tear-stained letters of my regret will remain forever unread, for I am never going to be strong enough to give them to you.

Courtney M. Privett

#4. Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gifted."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 32

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#5. To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

#6. I hear you don't write any more," he says ...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread.

Richard Russo

#7. Your love to me was like an unread book.

Countee Cullen

#8. I wonder at times if we're not all blind. It just seems there are an abundance of books unread, paint strokes not admired, and performances unattended. So much attention painstakingly sought and not given.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#9. A persistent and age-old instinct makes us want to wander
Into regions yet untrod
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.

Willis R. Whitney

#10. But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there.

Alexander McCall Smith

#11. She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.

Maud Hart Lovelace

#12. A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unread.

Stephanie Feldman

#13. 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

#14. Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."
That's me! And you, probably! That's us!

Nick Hornby

#15. Charlie looked at the great library of scrolls. It would take a lifetime to read them all, even for a genius. So this was how they'd trapped the great Cipher, thought Charlie. She was clever enough to escape any prison. But something in her nature couldn't let the scrolls go unread. Lily's

C.S. Quinn

#16. Death is the final chapter in a book you can't unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

Karen Marie Moning

#17. I'm afraid most Bibles remain unopened and unread. Don't let this be true of yours!

Billy Graham

#18. 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

#19. your days are like pages, the chapters unread. you have to keep turning your book has no end

John Steinbeck

#20. Manage me, I'm a mess
Turn a page, I'm a book
Half unread

All Time Low

#21. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

John Waters

#22. Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

Christopher Paolini

#23. When I re-read, I know what I'm getting. It's like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity.

Jo Walton

#24. We often feel the most stress, or the most emotionally hijacked, when we stare into the void of our jam-packed to-do list, in-box, or desk top. One look at the towering pile of papers looming on our desk, or the 300 unread e-mails, and our feelings of control fly right out the window.

Shawn Achor

#25. It made the Baudelaire sisters a little sad to see all those books sitting in the library unread and unnoticed, like stray dogs or lost children that nobody wanted to take home.

Lemony Snicket

#26. Redeem the time. Redeem the unread vision of a higher dream ...

T. S. Eliot

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

Brandon Mull

#28. 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

#29. He wondered what percentage of the world's art was actually kept in bank vaults and the like. Like unread books and unplayed music, did it matter that art went unseen?

Ian Rankin

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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. Le Guin

#33. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

Nicole Krauss

#34. 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

#35. If you know how to read, you know how forever. You can't unread.

Alison McGhee

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day?
- p.397, as by Larry Zagorski, in his short story "The City of the Sun

Jake Arnott

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

Octavio Paz

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

Gabriel Zaid

#44. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

John Dryden

#46. it seems to me that people have far more unread books than they once did, ranging from three to more than forty.

Marie Kondo

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. I feel as though I am shelved. That I have been given the words to the story of my life, but that I have remained largely unread ...

J.R. Ward

#50. I thought with melancholy how 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

#51. I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'

Harmony Korine

#52. 1 unread message. Rustom tapped it open, a little unsure, and a whole lot afraid.
Know your future, call 45678. World Famous Astrologer.
Fuck you. From now on, I am making my own destiny.

Gaurav Parab

#53. So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.

Anais Nin

#54. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread.

Lev Grossman

#55. Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death).

Steve Jones

#56. Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

Oscar Wilde

#57. An unread book does nobody any good

Brandon Mull

#58. Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.

B.R. Myers

#59. John Rebus ~ he tried to walk through the isles (of the book shop) without focusing. If he focused he would become interested and if he became interested he would buy. He already had over fifty unread books at home, piled next to his bed

Ian Rankin

#60. 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

#61. Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.

Stella Gibbons

#62. Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

John Waters

#63. The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

China Mieville

#64. An unread book is just a block of paper.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#65. Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting.

Laurie R. King

#66. He is too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station and reputation.

John Adams

#67. Be warned, reader. Once seen, something cannot be unseen and once read, something cannot be unread. What lies ahead can be the future of spirit but the future of spirit can also be what lies inside your head.

S.A. Tawks

#68. The unread is always better than the unreadable.

Oscar Wilde

#69. 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

#70. A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.

Helen Oyeyemi

#71. She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers - awful, as usual - their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.

Stella Gibbons

#72. Unread books are like unopened doors.

Thomas F. Shubnell

#73. The myth of objectivity made nonfiction increasingly unread. In feature articles, we could be playful in the opening and clever in the end but in the middle it was back to the boring basics.

Lee Gutkind

#74. 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

#75. Nothing leaves a scar upon an Authors heart more than a book they've written with purpose going unread.

Mark W. Boyer

#76. What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

Henry David Thoreau

#77. Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.

Katarina Bivald

#78. Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete.

Barbara Wersba

#79. I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn't increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

Seth Godin

#80. How many books do you have here?" Corliss asked. "Two million, one hundred thousand, and eleven," the librarian said proudly, but Corliss was frightened. What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?

Sherman Alexie

#81. While floor statements from today's [congressional] representatives are typically delivered to empty galleries and published into unread oblivion, legislative debates in the Reconstruction era were widely disseminated and closely observed.

Andrew Buttaro