“Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
“It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.”
“Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer.”
“He knows solitude. He knows its pleasure and its power. He knows it is a home you can occupy.”
“Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude”