“One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ there is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emmerson