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How shall any man who hath a genius for history undertake such a work with spirit and cheerfulness, when he considers that he will be read with pleasure but a very few years?
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The fame of our writers is confined to these two islands, and it is hard if it should be limited in time as well as place by the perpetual variations of our speech.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
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The proper study of mankind is books.
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A book is like a man: clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
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Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
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Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
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It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.
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In every novel, the character is a collage: a collage of different characters that you've known, or heard about or read about.
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