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 »
It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people and... start them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, "Did you get an erection?" I...f the answer is "Yes" from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indolence ... indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to t...ake the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without both...ering to read the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnson's Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at it--the sty...le, the sentiments are inimitable--but the subject is dreadful--and, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble--O heavens! how dreadful, how terrible it is to be told by a man of his genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real happiness is ever unattainable in this world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O! I must tell you that I have fallen in love with a gentleman whom I have lately come acquainted with: he is about 60 or 70--has ...the misfortune to be humpbacked, crooked legged, and rather deformed in his face.--But, in sober sadness, I am delighted with the Dean of Coleraine, whose picture this is, and which I have very lately read. The piety, the zeal, the humanity, goodness and humility of this charming old man have won my heart. Ah! who will not envy him the invaluable treasure!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read ...the papers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »