If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
--
'Borgias on my mind'Clive James
In the United States dramatically, here fortunately much less so, the book store as we have known it is dying. In the United States it is now largely an emporium, featuring music, records, Christmas cards, a large range fo semi-cultural and kitsch products with books fighting for their actual spatial lives. In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good book stores have had to close, and what we have now are text book emporia which are not book stores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other wordswhere there is none of the genius of waste which a great book store has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a book store.
George Steiner
I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me tears me to small pieces but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly... I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too something-or-other to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face...
James Branch Cabell
There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book any sort of book is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead.
Robertson Davies
You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's.
John Selden
James, Clive
James, Donald
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