“It is a curious thing that so many people only go into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book... There are some knightly souls who... go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf — why not ride up, fling her across your charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly, you booklovers!”

“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.”