“No two persons ever read the same book.”

“No two people ever read the same book.”

“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

“Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.”

“Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”

“A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”