Emily D

“Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued: "In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Agreements in the organizations of world power are never reached on the floor. They are made in the delegates' lounge and corridors long before the voting begins.”
― Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked With Heroes