“Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when othersare sitting in judgment on them.”

“After all, when I was in school, I thought I had a good time. It was only after I graduated and got out into the worlf that I realized how miserable I'd acutally been.”

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue."I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

“My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.”

“Thousands of persons, many of whom never darkened the door of a college, have learned to read books that most of our college graduates fear to tackle. teachers who understand this fact can help a student read the books that educated the Founding Fathers but not by explaining in lectures what the author would have said if he had been as bright as the lecturer.”

“Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years' study of history; and realized that I had never used the index of a book fit to read.”