“In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

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American author, poet, editor and literary critic 1809–1849

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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

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Mariko Tamaki (1975) Canadian writer and artist

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“We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.”

Maureen Corrigan (1955) American journalist and writer

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“The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves — it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence — it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste — and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own!”

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“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

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“It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.”

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Source: 2010s, Free Will (2012), p. 64

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”

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“Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate, because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy.”

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“We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”

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