If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the be...st and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as all children's books shouldn't be read by children (nor by anyone else), neither should children read only children's book...s. Every young child should be exposed to poetry--good adult poetry--not only to learn to appreciate the rhythm of its sophisticated beat (as opposed to the amusing, political doggerel of Mother Goose) but because poetry has the scope and precision to conjure pictures that prose can seldom paint.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All my good reading, you mught say, was done in the toilet.... There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet-...-if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover,... serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statis...tics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the ...illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I am going from my valley. But thi...s time I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my 50 years of memory--memory. Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago of men and women long since dead. Yet who shall say what is real and what is not. Can I believe this all gone when their voices are still a glory in my ears. No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can go close my eyes on my valley as it is today and it is gone. And I see it as it was when I was a boy--green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth. In all Wales there was none so beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may hav...e been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: n...ot so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »