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The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature QUOTES

The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature QUOTES

1 " Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew. "

― Clifton Fadiman , The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature

2 " Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field—that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers—rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more—for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so. "

― Clifton Fadiman , The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature

3 " We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something—not much, but something—of our position in space and time. "

― Clifton Fadiman , The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature