First Reads Quotes

“I am a very ‘unvoracious’ reader, and since I can seldom bring myself to read a work twice I think of the many things that I read – too soon! Nothing, not even a (possible) deeper appreciation, for me replaces the bloom on a book, the freshness of the unread. Still what we read and when goes, like the people we meet, by ‘fate.’

Letter 189
From a letter to Mrs M. Wilson”
― Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien