Books Quote by Michael Dirda

“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.” quote by Michael Dirda — Download Open image

“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

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More by Michael Dirda

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure…

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I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.

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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,…

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The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work with a living wage to all its citizens.

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Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn't tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur…

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“Books, by their very nature and variety, help us grow in empathy for others, in tolerance and awareness. But they should increase our skepticism as well as our humanity, for all good readers know how easy it is to misread. What counts is to stay receptive and open, to reserve judgment and try to foresee consequences, to avoid the facile…

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My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that…

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Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters - as a good first reader ought - we can now look at how the book…

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