Common Reading Experience

Famous quotes containing the words reading experience, common, reading and/or experience:

    “For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.”
    —Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)

    “It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading ... may be given without first getting the author’s permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.”
    —Robert Benchley (1889–1945)

    “The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”
    —R.D. (Ronald David)