We apologists of the humanities haven’t always done the best job of justifying our vocation, but it seems to me that the book is the best place for our case to make itself.

—Christy Wampole, “On Distraction”

Let us give the mind a new book, as one drops a lump of fish into a cage of fringed and eager sea anemones, and watch it pausing, pondering, considering its attack. Let us see what prejudices affect it; what influences tell upon it. And if the conclusion becomes in the process a little less conclusive, it may, for that very reason, approach nearer to the truth.

—Virginia Woolf, “An Essay In Criticism”