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Michael Dirda
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Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.
- Michael Dirda
#Communication
#Language
#Learning
#World
Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.
- Michael Dirda
#Hate
#Me
#Sad
#Start
#Time
To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.
- Michael Dirda
#Dreams
#Mind
#Night
#Reality
#Woods
I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to diss them. But you don't really have any guarantees that what you're reading wasn't written out of friendship or spite.
- Michael Dirda
#Comments
#Find
#Friendship
#Out
#Reading
I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process.
- Michael Dirda
#Completion
#Me
#Mean
#Pleasure
#Process
The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work with a living wage to all its citizens.
- Michael Dirda
#Just
#Living
#Satisfying
#Society
#Work
I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.
- Michael Dirda
#I Am
#Old
#Something
#Thrift
#Youth
I'm sometimes willing to put in vast, even inordinate amounts of time if I find a project that interests me.
- Michael Dirda
#Find
#Me
#Project
#Sometimes
#Time
A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
- Michael Dirda
#Easy
#I Can
#Myself
#Remember
#Soul
Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit.
- Michael Dirda
#Bring
#Home
#Pencil
#Places
#Visit
I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.
- Michael Dirda
#Bank
#Believe
#People
#Rich
#Work
On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
- Michael Dirda
#Beautiful
#Day
#Great
#Home
#Time
A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one's gifts and talents, is what truly matters.
- Michael Dirda
#Exercise
#Family
#Live
#Self-Realization
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
- Michael Dirda
#Fiction
#House
#Sometimes
#Swing
#Wise
People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I'm addicted, that I'm no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers.
- Michael Dirda
#Better
#Home
#Old
#People
#Sometimes
In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy.
- Michael Dirda
#Country
#Great
#Portrait
#Space
#Truth
In truth, I'm not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only pet I've ever really loved.
- Michael Dirda
#Dog
#Person
#Pet
#Truth
#Wonder
Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents' Code.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Dad
#Me
#Mom
#Parents
For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Me
#Night
#Pressure
#Weather
Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Deep
#Own
#Seasons
#Time
Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Coffee
#Dinner
#Ghosts
#Time
It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Day
#Movies
#Sad
#Time
My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.
- Michael Dirda
#Christmas
#Look
#Past
#Time
#Walk
Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.
- Michael Dirda
#Captain
#Christmas
#Remember
#Television
Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming.
- Michael Dirda
#Find
#Lazy
#People
#Quiet
#Underwater
Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin.
- Michael Dirda
#Best
#Hill
#Hot
#Practice
#Sketching
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