“If you believed yourself to be a writer of eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill-not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.”
“The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.”
“Books didn't figure in my family very much. . . . However, my grandmother's attic was full of old, old books . . . In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That's when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine.”
“[For the speedy reader] paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.”
“The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.”
“Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.”
