Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.