It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

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

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.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.