On books and reading

• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. —Francis Bacon

•   A good reader is a “rereader.”  —Vladimir Nabokov

• We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.  —Harold Bloom

• In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.  —Harold Bloom

•  Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  —Charles W. Eliot

• I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.  —E.M. Forster

•  A book is a mirror:  when a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out. —Lichtenberg

•  All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you:  the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.  —Ernest Hemingway