From "Book by Book: Notes on reading and Life"
by Michael Dirda, Henry Holt and Company, 2005

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason,
because they understand everything too soon.
-- Alexander Pope

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his
responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided
opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to
come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing
of the present.  He will teach literature, not social
studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs
of many lands.  And if the student find this not to
his taste?  Well, that is regrettable.  His taste
should not be consulted; itis being formed.
-- Flannery O'Connor

[We learn best by placing our] confidence in men and
women whose examples invite us to love what they love.
-- Robert Wilken

The teacher is both the end and the sanction of the
education he gives.  This is why it is completely
reasonable that a student should expect a classicist
to live classically.  The man who teaches Shakespeare
or Homer runs the supreme risk.  This is surely as it
should be.  Charisma in a teacher is not a mystery or
a nimbus of personality, but radiant exemplification
to which the student contributes a corresponding
radiant hunger to becoming.
-- William Arrowsmith

Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.
-- Samuel Beckett's noble paradox

"An awed interviewer once exclaimedto jazz saxophonist
Charlie Parker, 'You do amazing things on the
saxophone, Mr. Parker.'  The musician replied, 'I
don't know about amazing--I practiced for fifteen
hours a day for a few years.'"

[Through nature]
the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.
-- William Wordsworth

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary
ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual
lifelong construction of a state of wonder and
serenity.
-- Glenn Gould

Slowly now, nice neat letters;
The point is to do things well
not just to do them.
-- Antonio Machado.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.
-- G. K. Chesterton

[Aesthetic education should create] a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the
presence of beautiful objects.
-- Walter Pater

It is the capacity for making goodor bad art a personal
matter that makes a man a critic.
-- B.H. Haggin

If a book isn't worth reading over and over again,
it isn't worth reading at all.  [paraphrase?]
-- Oscar Wilde

It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to
determine definitely whether a given book is "good"
or "bad".  The notion to the contrary is a delusion
of the defectively intelligent.
-- H.L. Mencken

[As he was taken away by the secret police, in mid-
career:] But I was not given time to finish!
-- Isaac Babel
----

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
Ferdinand Mount, Fairness
A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun

Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship
B.H. Haggin, Music for One Who Enjoys Hamlet

Stendhal, On Love
Steven Millhauser, An Adventure of Don Juan
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Proust, In Search of Lost Time (esp. "Swann in Love")

Plato, Symposium / Apology / republic
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Francois duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays / Journals
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University