The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

by C.S. Lewis

But as Mortimer Adler once remarked, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.

But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

It is the immemorial privilege of letter-writers to commit to paper things they would not say: to write in a more grandiose manner than that in which they speak: and to enlarge upon feelings which would be passed by unnoticed in conversation.