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The common reader, she said, “differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.”
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?
believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. My books, therefore, have always been rigidly regimented.
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure. Given a choice—at least in my reading—I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.
These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book.
“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
My reactionary self has aesthetic as well as grammatical standards, and his’er is hideous.
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
