“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
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George Santayana 109
20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with P… 1863–1952Related quotes

“In my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than the text-books.”
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“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.”
Source: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
V. S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980) [Random House, ISBN 0-394-74683-X], "Edmund Wilson: Towards Revolution," p. 141
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.