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Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and p...more

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How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if yo...more

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We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; ...more

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There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in whic...more

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You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

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We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

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There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

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Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, poli...more

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Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

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Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

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One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes s...more

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Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

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Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.