“If you plant a book deep enough in the soil it will come back every spring. Draughts cannot kill it. Nor frosts. Nor overhot suns. Nor overcold snows.... It is alive? Does its nerve tingle when you touch it? Does it still answer you back life for life? Here is a book... made five hundred years before we commenced our Christian total of years. Is it a corpse? No. It still has red in its cheeks. Its eyes sparkle. Its handclasp is warm.... You do not need to set back the clock to get contemporary with it.... It takes me back and forward with equal ease. Time has nothing to do with [it]. It has bettered all the challenges of time. It has neither age nor youth. It has life.”

“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.”