“For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face to the

reader
every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. When as a youth I read for the first time,
only partially understanding it, Goethe's Elective Affinities, that was a completely different book from
the Elective Affinities that I have now read perhaps for the fifth time! The great and mysterious thing
about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more
associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its
individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and
uniqueness--at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of
nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes,
suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand
years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the
countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.”
The Magic Book: My Belief, Hermann Hesse

“O let my books be then the eloquence

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.”
from Sonnet XXIII, William Shakespeare

“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my
entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless,
irksome babbler, as we all are. But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every
intelligent man is babble—that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.”
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

“‘Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?’ Mo had said…'As if
something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds,
smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a
slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both
strange and familiar.’”
Inkspell, Cornelia Funke

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that
moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is
different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of
releasing it even after a long time.”
The Storyteller: Illuminations, Walter Benjamin

“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I
thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the
unknown past into the unknown future.”
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
“As great, everlasting,
Adamantine laws
Dictate, we must all
Complete the cycles
Of our existence.
Only mankind
Can do the impossible:
He can distinguish,
He chooses and judges,
He can give permanence
To the moment.”
from On The Divine Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”

American Gods, Neil Gaiman
“I’ll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to
another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other
people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either
to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the
government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity’s sake. Oh I am aware that we hear a great
many flattering things nowadays about your great common man — you know, it has already been
revealing to me that he is perfectly content so to be called, because that is exactly what he is: the
common man and when I say common I mean common as hell.”
The Movie Goer, Walker Percy