How To Read a Book

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• Note: This is actually so well-written that I can't just summarize it, sometimes I have to put the entire sentences in.

• Publishing--after an author dies, the book is his future which we cannot measure.

• On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust. Yet even this form of the future is better than the memory of a few surviving relatives or friends on which one cannot rely, and often it is precisely the appetite for this posthumous dimension which sets one's pen in motion.

• So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands - those in octavo, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc. - we won't be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with someone's rustling ashes. In a manner of speaking, libraries (private or public) and book stores are cemeteries; so are book fairs.

• After all, what goes into writing a book - be that a novel, a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, a biography or a thriller - is, ultimately, a man's only life: good or bad, but always finite.

• Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger.

• Since we are dying, we have to devote which books to read. We read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

• The problem with reviewers is that they can be hacks, they can have strong predilections for a certain kind of writing, and they can just turn the review into an independent art form.

• You might want to develop your own taste on reading.

• Or you might want to rely on hearsay, or a reference in a text that you also like.

• If i had been a publisher, I'd be putting on my books' covers not only their authors' names but also the exact age at which they composed this or that work.

• The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry.

• Poetry: teaches prose the value of each word and the mental patterns of the species.

• Literature started with poetry (nomad songs).

• Poetry is synonymous with economy.

• A book of poetry will in all likelihood be lighter than a book of prose.