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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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"From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library..."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"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
"Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change."
Change
"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron."
Success
"What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era."
People
"If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit."
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
"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."
Reading
"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
"I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene."
Progress
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
Literature
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