A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. – William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. – Judah Ibn Tibbon

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. – W. H. Auden