This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure here.
How to Read a Book by Monica Wood is not only a moving book, but it has so many great quotes that will make you stop and think. Some will bring tears to your eyes, and some will make you laugh out loud.
This is one of my favorite books I have read all year. (Read my review of How to Read a Book here.)
While there are some books I just fly through, this is one of those books I read with my pencil in hand because there were so many great How to Read a Book quotes that I wanted to make sure I could come back to.
You will find many of those memorable quotes on this list here.
(If you read this book, let me know if there are any quotations that you think are missing, and I will add them!)
Quotes from How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
“Everything here is designed to murder your privacy.”
“I feel the way I always feel in Book Club. The way I believe we all feel. Safe.”
“When we gather to talk about books . . . We’re readers . . . Not embezzlers. Not murderers. Readers.”
“In order for reading to become an exercise in empathy, it helps to think of all the characters in all the books as fellow creatures.”
“She and the women had passed the winter reading books they hadn’t cracked since age fifteen, books with recollected plots, books with well-trod furrows of discussion, books understood best in retrospect. She was glad to have honored their request to revisit the past, for the future—theirs; hers—felt shadowy, and immense, and beyond distinction.”
“Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a ‘meanwhile’—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.”
“Maybe tears hide away in the body until such time as they can spout safely.”
“Women left prison physically diminished, but in Violet that diminishment seemed of a different order, as if that part of God that is said to dwell in all creatures had flown from her, only to perch somewhere nearby, awaiting reentry.”
“People set their husbands afire, they nurse their dying mothers, they rob demented old men, they sing songs that bring listeners to tears, they kill a woman while drunk on love and 86-proof. The line between this and that, you and her, us and them. The line is thin.”
“One thing I learned in prison is that sometimes rotten things fly off people’s tongues because they’re mean, but mostly it’s because they’re scared.”
“I’m just a person who hopes to become a good person.”
“Iambic pentameter doesn’t hurt.”
“Eleven notebooks, eleven bent heads, eleven pens moving across eleven pages in iambic pentameter . . . all of them connected by a dead Irishman.”
“Elmer Karr: the murdering lover. Nineteen years old. He, too, went to prison, and when he got out, all of Spoon River forgave him. I read, Oh, loving hearts that took me in again. . . . I looked up at Harriet. “Everybody just forgave him, like that?”
“We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.”
“A flowery field in the first breath of summer. Which sounds poetic, but there’s a prison on it.”
“Forgive everyone.”
“If you read with pure intention, she believed, then Jesus does not judge.”
““This broken daughter was my true and necessary punishment, the thing I deserved more than prison.” everyone.”
“I can accept your apology, which isn’t necessary. But I honestly don’t know how to accept your forgiveness.”
“If you’ve never happened upon a man whose wife died because of you but finds a way to shine with mercy, I’m sorry.”
“Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.”
“I used to race through books one after another, but in Book Club, Harriet taught us that when you slow down, you notice more, and when you notice more, you feel more.”
“Reading one book makes it part of all the books you’ve ever read, Harriet said, so she was forever dragging other books into our discussion.”
“Unless you slow down, you don’t see things.”
“‘The great Harriet woman told you that literate adults must be taught how to read?’”
“‘The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.’”
“‘The great Harriet woman told you that literate adults must be taught how to read?’”
“For decades he’d sensed a whiff of wrong in everything he aimed for, but Harriet seemed to accept his good intentions. Or, more precisely, to accept his intentions as good.”
“Depth of mercy, can there be, mercy still reserved for me.” (From the hymn, Depth of Mercy by Charles Wesley.)
What is your favorite quote from How to Read a Book?? Share in the comments below.
More How to Read a Book Resources
Free PDF Download
Download the Book Club Discussion Guide!
Find the discussion guide in the free resource library!