“I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”
“AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.”
Source: ABC of Reading (1934), p. 42
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Ezra Pound 68
American Imagist poet and critic 1885–1972Related quotes

Source: The Reader's digest vol. 140, no. 837-842 (1992), p. 159

Variant: He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.
Source: Mein Kampf

“The world is divided into those who understand me and those who don’t.”
In the case of the latter, I simply leave them to torment themselves trying to gain my sympathy.
Aleph (2011)


Don, in The Philanthropist (1969), scene 6