“He generally took more books out of the library than he was able to read before they were due back.
His charging records at the Boston Athenaeum, the Harvard College Library, and the Boston Society Library are not so much a measure of his intake as of his appetite.
He glanced at thousands of books. He read carefully many hundreds that caught his attention. He returned over and over to a favourite few…”
Robert D. Richardson on Emerson in First We Read Then We Write
I’ve added this to my Reading Quotations page (did you know that I have such a thing?) and am thrilled to have found it in this slim volume about Emerson on the Creative Process.
That sounds like a complicated title; I like to think of it as Emerson on Being Bookish, but then again, I’m not an Emerson scholar.
Have you found any delightfully bookish quotes lately?
How do you collect little passages like this, and what do you do with them (post them on the fridge, jot them in a journal…)?
PBurt – I’m sure you’d find other quotes of interest in here too…more to fill your journal(s)!
Stefanie – I’ve been thinking of tumblr…it really does seem to lend itself to collecting quotes. Hmmmmmm.
I love Emerson and this is a wonderful little book. Richardson’s biography of him is marvelous. Emerson was quite a bookish fellow but he also warns against being too bookish and letting others do the thinking for you. I keep a commonplace book and I also have a tumblr blog that I have actually been using more often lately than my notebook.
Thank you for such a lovely quote. I have also bookmarked the book as something to look out for. I write my quotes in a quote journal – I have two: one for great passages and the other is more spiritually oriented.