Why Read? Quotes

“What Proust is describing is an act of self-discovery on the part of his reader. Immersing herself in Proust, the reader may encounter aspects of herself that, while they have perhaps been in existence for a long time, have remained unnamed, undescribed, and therefore in a certain sense unknown. One might say that the reader learns the language of herself”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

“In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, there is a passage that gets close to the core of what a literary education should be about. The passage offers a deep sense of what we can ask from a consequential book. Proust speaks with the kind of clarity that is peculiarly his about what he hopes his work will achieve. In particular, he reflects on the relation he wants to strike with his readers. "It seemed to me," he observes, "that they would not be 'my' readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book but with it I would furnish them the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' I should ask whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

“The best beginning reads is often the one with the wherewithal to admit that, living in the midst of what appears to be a confident, energetic culture, he among all the rest is lost.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

“It helps us to create and re-create ourselves, often against harsh odds. So I will be talking here about the crafting of souls.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

“The reader learns the language of herself; she is humanly enhanced, enlarging the previously constricting circle that made up the border of what she's been... her consciousness has been expanded.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

“Poetry -- literature in general -- is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes. Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth... in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Read?