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Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed ...more

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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

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Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relat...more

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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

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The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

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So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and c...more

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To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the gro...more

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One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fictio...more

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For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

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Has it ever happened to you," Léon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as...more

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You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in t...more