Reader Quotes - page 19
There have been many complaints of people interested in the occult sciences that they had never got any chance at all to be initiated by a personal master or leader (guru). Therefore only people endowed with exceptional faculties, a poor preferred minority seemed to be able to gain this sublime knowledge. Thus a great many of serious seekers of the truth had to go through piles of books just to catch one pearl of it now and again. The one, however, who is earnestly interested in his progress and does not pursue this sacred wisdom from sheer curiosity or else is yearning to satisfy his own lust, will find the right leader to initiate him in this book. No incarnate adept, however high his rank may be, can give the disciple more for his start than the present book does. If both the honest trainee and the attentive reader will find in this book all they have been searching for in vain all the years, then the book has fulfilled its purpose completely.
Franz Bardon
[...] we can strip off all grammatical clues to sentence structure, all affixes and prepositions, and yet still achieve communication. Thus restricted to nouns, simple "stories" can be told in word chains: Woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police.... Again, the reader's past experience of his language is sufficient to restore the missing elements, sufficiently accurately for the purpose. But of course, not only does the reader have experience of sentence structure, enabling him to supply the missing syntactical elements, but also he has experience of typical contexts in which the various words are used; many words bear an aura about with them. It might be more difficult to tell a tale about a policeman who robbed a woman, for instance, with so little redundancy!
Colin Cherry
It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.
Peter Greenaway
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality.
Alberto Manguel
