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There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the...more

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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

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The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there ...more

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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare...more

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In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'W...more

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He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shut...more

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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in ...more

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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.