A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. – Jeremy Collier
How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination. – Jeremy Collier
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company. – Jeremy Collier
In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part. – Jeremy Collier
Readers of novels. I sometimes think that I could, if put to it, pick the real readers of novels out of a crowd. They have a strangeness about the eye, almost as if there were an extra bit of lens on the cornea…. The glance of a reader shows me a soul with a different orientation to time… – Sven Birkerts (b.1951), “Notes from a Confession,” The Agni Review, No.22 (1985)