It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of... computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That primitive head So ambitiously vast,... Yet so rude in its art, Is as easily read For the woes of the past As a clinical chart.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 »
I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the libert...y of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her--Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone--a long galaxy of great women.... Those older women have gone on, and most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of ali...enation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: i...t is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... a friend told me that she had read of a woman who had knitted a wash rag for President Wilson. She was eighty years old and he...r friends thought it remarkable that she could knit a wash rag! I thought that if a woman of eighty could knit a wash rage for a Democratic President it behooved one of ninety-six to make something more than a wash rag for a Republican President.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of n...ature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hallie: Ranse, do you think I could, I, I mean, grown up and all? Do you think I could learn to read? Ranse: Why sure you can..., Hallie. Why, there's nothing to it. It'd be, it'd be easy. Can you learn how to read? Why, I, I can teach you. A smart girl like you. Of course you can learn how to read. Now you wanna try? Hallie, I'll teach ya how. In no time you'll be reading everything. Hallie: It's awful worrisome not knowin' how. I know the good book from preacher talk. But it'd be a sole comfort if I could read the words for myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »