The Literary Clinic: The Joy of Books

My favourite thing of today - definite bibliotherapy, after a long day at the office!

Quotations

"The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something lofty about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic." Alan Bennett, The Common Reader, pp. 30-31.

"Any external pressure to write scholarly books and articles is pernicious not only because it may well divert a career from its natural course, thus causing a great deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship." Richard D. Altick and John J. Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research, p.13

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things." Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve” - Montesquieu

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Milton, Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicenced printing to the Parliament of England

“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”― Thomas à Kempis

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas à Kempis

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorge Luis Borges

The book was the culminating event in medieval culture before it was the first invention of the modern world...The printed book...is in the first instance an agent of the continuity of medieval culture rather than its rupture.

James Carey, 'The Paradox of the Book', Library Trends 33, no 2(Fall 1984): 110.

How many realize that the borrowing of a reasonably well-written novel, instead of the purchase of a semi-illiterate periodical or novelette, is a move full of hope and fraught with possibilities?
Stanley Unwin, 1935

The Literary Clinic

Tuesday, 10 January 2012

The Joy of Books

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