“Let us look from our place here in 1882 — the age of civilization — forward one hundred years, to 1982 — in the age of enlightenment. A very peculiar feature of the morals of the infant ages was the effort to be good by being stupid. Children were forbidden to read novels and confined to Sunday-school books, till one morning the people waked up to find that every Sunday-school book that had been written for sixty years, was itself a novel, and of the poorest sort at that, and that all of these children had read them, and had read nothing else, and so had moral natures of a skim milk sort. The cream was all in the forbidden books... Now, as a matter of fact, the novel is considered one of the grandest educators in the world.”

“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.”