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"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."
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"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."
"We encounter great souls by reading great books."
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
"Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."
"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"
"I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain."
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
Explore more quotes by Clifton Fadiman
"By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one."
"Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something."
"For most men, life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed."
"Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking."
"I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation."
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