How to Read and Why

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

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

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness

Jesus is present only as a supreme representation of suffering and change, one that Shakespeare (in his dangerous era) shrewdly and invariably avoided.

Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.

If there is a function of criticism at the present time, it must be to address itself to the solitary reader, who reads for herself, and not for the interests that supposedly transcend the self.