“Your choice is practically illimitable, for the literature of our England is strewn from end to end with a prodigality that almost frightens one.”

Celebrating the extraordinary breadth of the literary inheritance available to readers. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

• Literature
• Reading
• Wonder

“We are still quite a little lower than the angels.”

A humorous reminder that books cannot magically make humanity perfect. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

• Humanity
• Humour
• Reading

“I will ask you only one thing, reader: to pronounce my verses well and fit your voice to their passion, and not read them in the manner of a letter.”

Original: Je te supliray seulement d'une chose, lecteur, de vouloir bien prononcer mes vers et accomoder ta voix à leur passion, et non comme quelques uns les lisent, plustost à la façon d'une missive. — Verse meant to be spoken with feeling, not scanned like prose · Preface to La Franciade (French)

• Poetry
• Reading
• Voice

“A man who has a job, earns his living and can devote an hour a day to reading is lost to books when that hour is consumed by trivialities.”

Original: L'homme qui a un emploi, l'homme qui gagne sa vie et qui peut consacrer une heure par jour à la lecture, cette heure est dévorée par les affaires criminelles, les niaiseries incohérentes, les ragots et les faits les moins divers. — Valéry laments the competition between serious reading and the relentless stream of trivial information. · Regards sur le monde actuel (French)

• Books
• Modernity
• Reading

“We should long ago have become a race of unbearably perfect archangels if we could buy knowledge and prudence out of sevenpenny editions.”

A humorous reminder that reading alone cannot make people virtuous. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

• Humour
• Reading
• Wisdom

“I have always read in books rather than through them.”

Describing reading as an active search for ideas rather than a race through pages · Autobiographical Notes

• Books
• Knowledge
• Reading

“I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.”

Joyce describes reading as a stimulus to imaginative thought rather than merely an accumulation of knowledge. · Conversation about Giambattista Vico

• Ideas
• Imagination
• Reading

“Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation.”

Encouraging active vocabulary building through curiosity and research · Essay, Literary Composition

• Language
• Learning
• Reading

“The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.”

Defining weird fiction through the reader’s experience of cosmic dread · Essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature

• Fear
• Horror
• Reading

“I was seven years of age when my eldest brother died and though I had only been to school on occasional days I was able to read the tombstones in a neighbouring graveyard.”

Links precocious reading with an early encounter with death · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Mortality
• Reading

“I read of Troy and Nineveh and the nomads of the East and the mystery of Sahara.”

Books opened distant histories and landscapes to his childhood imagination · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Imagination
• Reading
• Wonder

“Books are the friends that never desert us, and in solitude they become almost living companions.”

Celebrating reading as a dependable form of companionship. · Letter

• Books
• Companionship
• Reading

“In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.”

Preferring close study of accomplished writers to abstract rules alone · Essay, Literary Composition

• Education
• Reading
• Writing

“What is reading but silent conversation.”

Capturing the intimate dialogue between reader and author · Imaginary Conversations

• Books
• Communication
• Reading

“It is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.”

Arguing that great older literature can feel remarkably contemporary. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

• Literature
• Reading
• Time

“I want to see the books around me as my own property, else the sight of them grieves me.”

Expressing the comfort he found in living among books of his own · Prose book, Beggars

• Reading
• Solitude

“Man reads too much and reasons too little. Great artists are not great readers but great observers.”

Puts looking at the world above living in libraries · Notes from The Hights

• Artists
• Observation
• Reading

“I have never regretted the hours spent in reading, even when the world called them wasted.”

Defending reading against the demand for more obviously productive occupations. · Letter

• Books
• Occupation
• Reading

“The whole thing is as modern as to-day’s evening paper—but with a freshness and a directness and a simplicity that isn’t common in modern work.”

Praising older literature for combining contemporary relevance with freshness and simplicity. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

• Literature
• Reading
• Simplicity

“I sometimes read French novels out-of-doors, merely for the antiseptic effect that the sun and air have on the offensive passages; but at best I often find myself glad that American birds and flowers do not understand French.”

Open air used as a moral filter for racy fiction · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

• Humour
• Nature
• Reading

“What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.”

Defending a child’s freedom to encounter books before fully understanding them · Prose, The Doctor

• Childhood
• Education
• Reading

“My admiration for Longfellow began early.”

Identifies one of the important literary enthusiasms of his childhood · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Reading

“I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out, is unendurable.”

A brisk critical preference for plain reality over extended allegory · Imaginary Conversations

• Criticism
• Literature
• Reading

“When I read in a book it was the page or the paragraph that I wanted, and which left its impression and became a part of my intellectual furniture.”

Describing reading as the selective gathering of ideas that become part of the mind · Autobiographical Notes

• Books
• Mind
• Reading