Books & Reading Quotes

“Then on my return home from the second-hand bookstore, I have to endure the outcries of my housekeeper, who accuses me of bursting all my pockets and filling the house with waste paper to attract the rats.”

“You say that you have gone all through The Book; but has it gone through you?”

“My oft-despondent heart rejoices; I hear again long-silent voices.”

“Oh, stately books, in handsome cases, all standing in their proper places, selected, with an artist's feeling, to match the furniture and ceiling! Pope's, Milton's, Scott's and Shakespeare's grinding, done up in costly leather binding, and all so dismal and forbidding, that you would cry, "Aw, quit your kidding," if some one said, "Sit down and read 'em, to browse around you have full freedom." They stand in rows, all unmolested, unread, unfingered, undigested, save when a housemaid comes to clean them, and from the dust and cobwebs wean them. The plute exhibits them to callers, and says, "They cost ten thousand dollars; I hired a man who knows good writers — that Shakespeare dub and kindred blighters — and said to him, 'Now, off you caper, and buy me books to match this paper; the libra'y's here, so go and trim it with Standard Works, and crowd the limit.'" In my cheap shack the books are scattered around the floor, all stained and battered; they have no deckle-edged ambitions — they're mostly fifty cent editions; but every hour and day I need them, and all the neighbors come and read them.”

“Having no home, what should I do with these, Tossed as I am about the sounding seas, Sport of exiling winds of change and chance— Feet in America, and heart in France. Homeless, 'tis meet I find my books a home: Coffined in crates and cases long they lay, Distant from me three thousand miles of foam Dungeoned in cellars cold and nailed away, As in a sepulchre, till Judgment Day. Lost to their gentle uses in the tomb, Cobwebbed companions of the spidered gloom, At last they rise again to live once more,— Dread resurrection of the auction room. Books I have loved so well, my love so true Tells me 'tis time that I should part from you, No longer, selfish, hoard and use you not, Nor leave you in the unlettered dark to rot, But into alien keeping you resign— Hands that love books, fear not, no less than mine. Thus shall you live upon warm shelves again, And 'neath an evening lamp your pages glow, Others shall press 'twixt leaf and leaf soft flowers, As I was wont to press them long ago; And blessings be upon the eyes that rain A tear upon my flowers—I mean on "ours"— If haply here and there kind eyes shall find Some sad old flower that I have left behind.”

“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner.”

“A precious – mouldering pleasure – 'tis – To meet an Antique Book – In just the Dress his Century wore – A privilege – I think – His venerable Hand to take – And warming in our own – A passage back – or two – to make – To Times when he – was young... His presence is enchantment – You beg him not to go – Old Volumes shake their Vellum Heads And tantalize – just so –”

“The brown book in his hand was his beloved Malory. He had not yet grown tired of its pages, nor had they lost their magic. They wore a halo, as they must do for natures like Antony's, which is a grail in itself. Is it not true that the realism of yesterday becomes the idealism of today?”

“I never read anything modern.”

“I love my love with an F because she gave me my copy of Arthur Davison Ficke's "Sonnets of a Portrait Painter" (which another wise friend, incognito, has since borrowed, forever, I fear)... I love my love with an M because through all one year in riding to work and back together, we carried Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Fatal Interview" in the automobile, and learned twenty-seven of the sonnets by heart. (A traffic stop is just time enough to say a sonnet if you really know it well.) I love my love with... a B and an F because in the first half of our teens we "stayed all night" at each other's house on alternate Saturdays, and read aloud until four in the morning... Brontë's "Jane Eyre" and Jessie Fothergill's "First Violin" (but not without weeping)! And so on through more than an alphabet of that sisterhood of printers' ink who to this day write book recommendations in the postscripts of their letters or on the backs of the envelopes.”

“The cricket is a small, black, ambulatory noise surrounded by a sentimental aura. On occasion it lives in the open fields, but its favorite habitat is behind a couch or under a bookcase in a room where somebody is trying to read.”

“Speed reading? Why would anyone give up the pleasure of letting the writer set the pace? Of using one's ears to adjust to a new voice?... This sort of reading does away with the writer, and is probably best used on textbooks which eliminate the write from the start. If you must read everything at the same speed, why not choose to read slowly?... slowly enough to let the words reverberate, to draw the imagination to them.”