Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

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

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.