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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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Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the wr...more

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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?

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anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

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She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her t...more

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The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glo...more

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For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot an...more

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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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Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be tr...more

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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon w...more

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The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to...more