“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.”

“As for Flaubert, Madame Bovary is one of the few novels that moves me in every way, not only in its style, but in its total communicability, like the effect of good poetry. What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. Its writer should, too.”

“I fancy that at the beginning some fairy may have offered me the choice between great power and station and the privilege of living always among books, and that I, like the good child in the fairy tale, chose the latter.”

“Destroying a book is like destroying a whole world.”

“It's just got me kind of wild, being turned loose amongst so many books.”

“Our passions are ourselves. My old books are Me. I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are.”

“There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read. A man reading a Le Queux mystery wants to get to the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end.”