Rereading Books Quotes

“Believe me, my parents are not going to wind up as a 'happily ever after." "Maybe not. But even if they don't, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth it for them. "How do you figure?" "Do you ever go back and reread books that you really love?" "Yes." This was probably so much of an understatement that it was actually a lie. "And you know what happens, right? Even in the tragedies. Look, Romeo and Juliet manage a double suicide, Beth dies and Laurie marries Amy, Rhett leaves Scarlett ..." "You read really girly books." He paused to roll his eyes at me. "I was trying to use examples you would know." "Sure." "The point is that we already know id doesn't work out, but we reread them anyway, because the good stuff that comes before the ending is worth it." This took me aback. It was a compelling argument- one I'd never considered. "Also!" Max shook his fingers as if giving a lecture. "In books, sometimes the foreshadowing is so obvious that you know what's going to happen. But knowing what happnes isn't the same as knowing how it happens. Getting there is the best part.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“Isn’t it remarkable how the same story can be so different depending on when you read it?”
― Madeline Martin, The Booklover's Library

“She hadn't been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit -and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“There’s a line in Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand where he talks about re-reading and says that this time the gleam of torchlight reflected in the water was a different gold. That about sums it up. I love the first re-read of a book, when I know what is coming and am not anxious either about what will happen or whether it will continue to be good, but it isn’t yet as familiar as an old slipper.”
― Jo Walton, Nevertheless, She Persisted: Flash Fiction Project

“Rereading does not lend itself to imperialistic interpretations that assume command of textual territory in the name of some over-riding truth. On the contrary, rereading insists on multiplicity of meaning, predicted as it is on awareness of the different revelations implicit in different encounters with a single book. (page 84)”
― Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading