Reading reacting upon us

To this end we must be supremely careful in our choice of authors, lest an inartistic and debased style infect our own writing and degrade our taste; which danger is best avoided by bringing a keen, critical sense to bear upon select works, observing the sense of each passage, the structure of the sentence, the force of every word down to the least important particle. In this way our reading reacts directly upon our style.
~Leonardo Bruni D'Arezzo, as quoted by Tracy L. Simmons in Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin