Unread Book Quotes

#1. 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

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

Brandon Mull

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. An unread book does nobody any good

Brandon Mull

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

F Scott Fitzgerald

#7. 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

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

Countee Cullen

#9. 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

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

Mark W. Boyer

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?

Mary Oliver

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

B.R. Myers

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. For the most part, Hollywood is very transactional. People want to make movies and television shows.

Michael Lynton

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I didn't want you to forget me. I'll never forget you.

S.C. Stephens

#23. 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

#24. I think that power comes in numbers, and we're in an industry where the actors need to have a bigger voice.

Julianna Margulies

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

All Time Low

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

John Steinbeck

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Nobody wins playing fair.

Shaun David Hutchinson

#30. 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

#31. The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.

Richard L. Currier

#32. 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