Annie Murphy Paul ("Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer," Time, June 03, 2013):
The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.
This is not reading as many young people are coming to know it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls 'carnal reading' and 'spiritual reading.' If we allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people.
William Poundstone (Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge, New York: Anchor Books, 1988. p. 200):
Most rational people do not ponder Newbold's and Levitov's cases long before rejecting them. To say exactly why we reject them is something else. Susan Sontag defined intelligence as a "taste in ideas." It is difficult to codify that taste.
Prince Shakur. When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir. Tin House, 2022:
Queer Black people quite literally create new words out of the space that we share with each other, and our appreciation of their power helps us create stories.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 258):
To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That's what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined love and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.
Aline Kilmer, (quoted by the AP, quoted in The Week, Feb. 5, 2016. p. 19):
Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning.
Akwaeke Emezi. Freshwater. (Grove Press, 2018):
We don’t have to swallow our work or be afraid that it’s too deviant to do well; there is, in fact, no canon we cannot touch. Even when seized by a thousand fears, we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can write into the unknown.
Mallarme (quoted in Anatole Broyard (d. 1990). Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993. p. 32):
If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.
Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Interviewed by Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "Rising Waters."
"One thing that people always hear me say came to me as a vision from my ancestors and became the motto for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and it’s this: Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree. You must take care of the root to heal the tree. If you want to get to the root of a problem, you need to dig for it, because roots that are really solid are not on the surface."
Uzma Aslam Khan (The Geometry of God, Clockroot Books, 2009. Kindle location 1718):
Until now we were stepping outside the box the lines were loose. But now Nana wants to follow the laws he wants a legal ghazal [poem]. While we think of one Nana says, 'Everyone understands love through the images of love like the bulbul and the rose or the hunted bird or eye lashes like daggers or we have made up our own. But a ghazal in English is illegal!'
George Saunders (Office Hours, Substack, March 7, 2024):
"Every second we spend writing, we are enacting a stance toward life itself.
The way we ought to feel, according to me: 'I am in this dream called life, living it, sometimes feeling trapped in it, sometimes feeling blessed to be in it, and I want – well, I want to leave something lovely behind, for those who will follow me (and for those who are out there in it with me right now), something that, through its complicated beauty, will bear testimony to how crazy and intense and nice it was being here. I hope to reassure and console with this work. (But not falsely.)'"
Willis Elliott (Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. p. 114):
Your 'soul,' by which here I mean your interiority, is compounded of all the conversations you’ve ever had — with other human beings, with God, and with yourself. That’s only one angle from which to describe your soul, but it’s a vital one, theoretically developed by social-psychologist George Herbert Mead (as the social origin of consciousness), and clinically tested and developed by a man I studied with, Hugh Missildine (as 'the child of the past within'). Mead died before I could get to him, but he got to me through his writings. Both men have been important in the shaping of my understanding of interiority and thus in my devising the Thinksheet genre.
James Baldwin, quoted in The San Diego Union-Tribune which was then quoted by The Week, July 28, 2017, p. 17:
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.
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