Quotes from Wendy Lesser

By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood.

Our talents do not entirely belong to us, nor do we choose them; they find us. - Lincoln Kirstein to Jerome Robbins

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.

T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).

man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born;

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

Part of the pleasure has to do with a sense of efficiency, of materials exactly allocated and completely used. Another part has to do with a sense of inevitability, the feeling that someone knew where we were headed all along, even if we and the characters did not.

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.

The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.

can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present

help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past.

I can call spirits from the vasty deep

Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?

PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It's not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else's world. To find myself in someone else's words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious

Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.

Satyr," he says, "is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety")