Michael Dirda > Quotes

“Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.”
― Michael Dirda

“Books, by their very nature and variety, help us grow in empathy for others, in tolerance and awareness. But they should increase our skepticism as well as our humanity, for all good readers know how easy it is to misread. What counts is to stay receptive and open, to reserve judgment and try to foresee consequences, to avoid the facile conclusion and be ready to change one's mind.”
― Michael Dirda

“As book collectors know all too well: We only regret our economies, never our extravagances.”
― Michael Dirda

“Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.”
― Michael Dirda

“I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.”
― Michael Dirda, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland

“The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind -- these are right and proper ideals for life.”
― Michael Dirda

“The memory of a tone, the rhythm of an author's sentences, the sorrow we felt on a novel's last page--perhaps that is all that we can expect to keep from books.”
― Michael Dirda, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

“Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.”
― Michael Dirda

“A good rule of thumb is: Pack twice as many books as changes of underwear.”
― Michael Dirda, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

“I also think of some books as my friends and i like to have them around. They brighten my life.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“. . if you are given lined paper, write crosswise. At least occassionally.”
― Michael Dirda

“Some of us, alas, are destined to find our escapes in novels, not life.”
― Michael Dirda, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

“we learn best by placing our 'confidence in men and women whose examples invite us to love what they love'(Robert Wilken).”
― Michael Dirda

“As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

“. . the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are our instruments of self-exploration.”
― Michael Dirda

“Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“Many people feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self interest.”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

“On any given day I’m likely to be working here at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
--Going, Going, Gone”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“A writer's greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes -- even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.”
― Michael Dirda

“None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we'd like, but we can still make a stab at it. Why deny yourself all that pleasure? so look around tonight or this weekend, see what catches your fancy on the bookshelf, at the library, or in the bookstore. Maybe try something a little unusual, a little different. And then don't stop. Do it again, with a new book or an old author the following week. Go on--be bold, be insatiable, be restlessly, unashamedly promiscuous.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“radio, I do use this product myself—I sometimes wonder how many David Foster Wallace fans know about his contributions. He comments, for instance, on the following words: “all of,”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“I was sent an advanced proof of “The Last Bookseller” — due out in November — and highly recommend it, partly for Goodman’s portrait of a lost world, but also for its colorful dramatis personae. Goodman once knew a book scout — the biblio-equivalent of an antiques picker — who “was so far off the grid he lived in the woods under a tarp. Michael Dirda, Washington Post”
― Michael Dirda

“It's an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better," while T.S. Eliot proclaimed that "Old men ought to be explorers." More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever "piece of iridescent mediocrity" we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

“I like first editions, though I’ll sometimes settle for a later printing if it’s within a year or two of the book’s original publication date. Only these editions possess that distinctive aura of the original, a glamour that subsequent reissues can never recapture. That said, I do gravitate toward well printed, scholarly treatments of certain classic texts, with lots of notes and a good bibliography. If I’m going to spend my life reading books, I want my experiences to be optimal.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“I’m ninety-four years . . . and my mind is just a turmoil of regrets. ... In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. “What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?” I say to myself. “You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.” She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.—Joseph Mitchell”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

“While I love most, not to say all, of James Thurber’s cartoons, there are a handful that seem especially”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings

“I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.”
― Michael Dirda, Browsings