“Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.”

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 105.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony.

Metaphors of Reading, p. 168.
A History of Reading (1996)

1 Cababe & Ellis' Q. B. D. Rep. 136.
Reg. v. Ramsey (1883)

Tout livre a pour collaborateur son lecteur<br><br>Source: Biographical notice http://www.evene.fr/celebre/biographie/maurice-barres-499.php on Evene

As quoted in &quot; Prescott triumphs on slippery slopes of syntax http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1235237,00.html&quot; by Simon Hoggart (10 June 2004); Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040609/debtext/40609-03.htm#40609-03_sbhd3 rendered this as &quot;we now have a satisfactory solution for not only coalition forces, but the Iraqi authorities&quot;.

Source: Leaves of Grass

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 76 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)