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

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The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is ...more

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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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To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western ...more

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Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, accordi...more

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Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

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Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

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Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in socie...more