Karen Swallow Prior > Quotes

“Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.”
― Karen Swallow Prior

“Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know—mainly because I learned it from books—that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“To read well is not to scour books for lessons on what to think. Rather, to read well is to be formed in how to think.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Indeed, there is something in the very form of reading—the shape of the action itself—that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Despair has encouraged some to place more faith in political leaders than in biblical principles. In turn, some Christians, disillusioned over what other believers have said or done, have chosen to disavow their family of faith, giving in to despair. To despair over politics—regardless of which side of the political divide one lands on—as many Christians have done in the current apocalyptic political climate, is to forget that we are but wayfarers in this land. Choosing hope—whether amid the annihilation of the world or merely a political breakdown—is virtuous.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.”65”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More--Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“A book that requires nothing from you might offer the same diversion as that of a television sitcom, but it is unlikely to provide intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual rewards long after the cover is closed.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“It is no coincidence that the term “voice” has come to mean in modern usage much more than just the sound made by the vocal organs, but also the means by which we make our individual selves known, not only to others but to ourselves. For the connection between the self and language is inseparable: it is through language that the self becomes.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“I retell in the pages of Booked how, by reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“In so doing, I resisted the descent into what the school counselors called low self-esteem. Self-esteem is the dark, distorted shadow of self-possession. Self-esteem gazes inward and wills the inner eye to like what it sees; self-possession looks inward only long enough to take a measure then looks outward at the world in search of a fitting place—and settles for no less.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”; we are what we repeatedly do.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Just as water, over a long period of time, reshapes the land through which it runs, so too we are formed by the habit of reading good books well.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, book were the backwoods path back to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“A useful education served women best, More thought. To ‘learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.’ Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It ‘is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,’ she argued.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“God can carry on his own work, though all such poor tools as I were broken.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“Our actions, our decisions, and even the very perceptions we register in our consciousness have been primed by the larger story—of our family, our community, our culture—in which we imagine ourselves.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“The more I see of the ‘hounoured, famed, and great,’ the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“What does it mean to practice faith well? While our works cannot save us, our habits can strengthen our faith.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

“Certainly, some reading material merits a quick read, but habitual skimming is for the mind what a steady diet of fast food is for the body.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“The fullness of literary language echoes meaning—and reminds us that there is, in fact, meaning.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Thomas Merton says, “Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“My struggle against God's ways only reinforced my belief in him. After all, one doesn't struggle against something one doesn't believe in. One doesn't rail against someone one thinks does not exist.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“I struggled against God. Not as many do. But still I did, in my own way. I didn't doubt his being. I doubted his ways. I doubted that his ways were better than my ways.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“Humility is not, therefore, simply a low regard for oneself; rather, it is a proper view of oneself that is low in comparison to God and in recognition of our own fallenness. "Humility is thinking less about yourself, not thinking less of yourself.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

“Jane exerts what little control she has as an otherwise politically and socially powerless woman of no means through her voice of sensitivity and longing and sharp wit. As she finds her voice, Jane’s journey to selfhood is assisted by her resisting the natural temptation to become like the people whose love she desires but does not receive. She refuses to become like her cruel aunt or her tyrannical cousin John or her spoiled girl cousins. Yet, at the same time, like any little child, she wishes to be loved by them.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

“But the cultivation and expression of virtue (and vice) and the formation of conscience is not merely an individual act but also a communal one. In addition to shaping individual experience and character, great literature has a role in forming the communal conscience and public virtue. We can understand a great deal about culture—its strengths, its weakness, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature it not only produces but reveres.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

“Similarly, we can hardly attain human excellence if we don’t have an understanding of human purpose. Human excellence occurs only when we glorify God, which is our true purpose.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books