“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.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interest…" by George Santayana?
George Santayana photo
George Santayana 109
20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with P… 1863–1952

Related quotes

Alberto Manguel photo
Harold Kroto photo

“In my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than the text-books.”

Harold Kroto (1939–2016) British chemist

Citation

Arthur Kekewich photo
Katherine Paterson photo
Annie Barrows photo

“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.”

Source: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

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)

Samuel Johnson photo

“Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

Thomas Wolfe photo
Wallace Stevens photo

“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.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"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.

Related topics