At some point, you start making your own book of quotations. They used to be called commonplace books and were a place where you copied the best lines from your reading. (My first was a spiral notebook with a brown cover.)
The practice is meant to bring you into closer contact with your reading, but the real discovery is about yourself: what kind of reader you are. You discover what you are like by comparing yourself to the general rule, the canon.
My book of quotations would be half filled with Montaigne and crowded with Greeks. But there would be a place for Roy Bedichek, Charles Lamb, Thomas Browne and Gilbert White, writers who were never wildly popular but who somehow manage to survive by attracting a few devotees in every generation. And I love minor poets.
There would be shocking lapses: Less Shakespeare than you’d expect, no Dickens, and of the Eliots, more George than T.S.
You don’t blindly follow the canon. But you can get a better sense where your own interests have led you to wander if you know where other readers have gone.
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