“It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”

“It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”

“In a very real sense, people who have read good literaturehave lived more than people who cannot or will not read.It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read,we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”

“Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.”

“To perceive how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are, is to comprehend a crucial aspect of the complicated business of living the life of a human being.”

“Exactitude is the lowest form of pictorial gratification.”

“The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do; and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives.”