Michael Dirda Quotes

Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn'...

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory rea...

Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - w...

I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to d...

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people inc...

Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's ta...

In truth, I'm not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew ...

Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vaca...

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christma...

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and internat...

Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty...

With any luck, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good cafe in one cor...

When I come to visit my mom - every two or three months - I generally spend five or six hours with h...

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journe...

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravita...

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes,...

Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect tha...

'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant t...

To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Steph...

Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm review...

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking inform...

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that the...