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"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."
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"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
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Personal Development
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
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Personal Development
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
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Personal Development
"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."
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Personal Development
"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
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Personal Development
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
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Personal Development
"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse."
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Personal Development
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
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"The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic."
Cause
"I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene."
Progress
"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron."
Success
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
Literature
"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."
Work
"Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies."
Art
"What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology."
Negative
"In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."
Fact
"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective."
Literature
"Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems."
Love
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