Mark Alexander

“Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and "reading material." The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts by the Underground Grammarian

“And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.”
― Richard Mitchell

“People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say