Today, as I get ready for the semester to begin on Monday, I’m thinking about two quotations I include in my syllabus.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!–When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library. -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

‘Tis the good reader that make the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear. -Ralph Waldo Emerson