The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

"The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing <i>of</i> lots of things, not knowing <i>about</i> them."

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

The text has disappeared under the interpretation.

It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.

To read is to strike a blow for culture

Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words <i>not</i> written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words,

Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, <i>Don Quixote</i> suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability.

Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

[reading a work in translation] is like viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side.