Sunday, February 08, 2015

If we consider men and women generally, and apart from the professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the colour of words, the odour of phrases, and the weight of sentences. They may even take the punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.

-- Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love this!
Sharm-ini

Anonymous said...

I love it too!
-- sham