ACTIVE READING
Arthur O. Lovejoy:
The student of the history of ideas must approach his historical sources certainly with an open but not with a passive mind.
ONE'S UNIVERSE IS BUILT ON TRUST
Adrienne Rich:
We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.
READING ALTERS THE READER
Siri Hustvedt:
Books are made between the words and spaces left by the writer on the page and the reader who reinvents them through her own embodied reality, for better and for worse.
WRAPPING UP A LIFE OF READING
William Maxwell:
Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the ‘‘Autobiographies’’ of William Butler Yeats.
BALANCING PHYSICAL WORK WITH INTELLECTUAL WORK
David Grene:
When I was on either of the two farms, I was incessantly and delightfully busy milking, feeding the animals, learning the ways of grass and grazing.
TAKING NOTE (AS IN NOTE-TAKING) CAN CHANGE ONESELF AND THE WORLD
Mary Cappello:
We come into the world handled, carried, and it is hoped, caressed, passed from hand to hand to hand, and gaze to gaze, a life-giving relay that yields in time a painstaking and laborious self-configuration arrived at via endless forms of representation, all of them historically grounded and political imbued; we learn, if you will, to see, and by extension, to know, think, and feel.