“I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality.”

— Mordecai Richler , book Barney's Version

Barney's Version (1997)

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Mordecai Richler 6

Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist 1931–2001

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“Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"
Context: Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments.

“Writing a book is so strange. You start off in one spot and end up in another. But I think when I first set out to write the book, there was a certain element of trying to right historical wrongs I saw as a voracious reader and representation of immigrants and children of immigrants…”

Uzma Jalaluddin (1980)

On what led her to write Ayesha At Last in “Interviews with authors at EMWF: Uzma Jalaluddin” https://theontarion.com/2018/09/13/interviews-with-authors-at-emwf-uzma-jalaluddin/ in The Ontarion (2018 Sep 13)

“If, being duke and peer, you would not be contented with my standing uncovered before you, but should also wish that I should esteem you, I should ask you to show me the qualities that merit my esteem. If you did this, you would gain it, and I could not refuse it to you with justice; but if you did not do it, you would be unjust to demand it of me; and assuredly you would not succeed, were you the greatest prince in the world.”

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“If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant, ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must — he cannot help himself — become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.
If any strain of my "broken music" make a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.