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…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen w...more

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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he ha...more

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Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some ple...more

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Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...more

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The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fi...more

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For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, ...more

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

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What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not res...more

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Books are the mirrors of the soul.

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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. Wh...more

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What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?