"I shall write an ode!" threatened Philip direfully. "Ah no, that is too much!" cried De Vangrisse with feeling.

Blessed are the meek, for to them we shall say "Beautiful boys."

Words are immortal - Elinor

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the...

Do gooders don't interest me. They are the least interesting people on the planet.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Abandon all patience, ye who enter beyond this door.

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no...

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state...

Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

"... I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature."

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high...

Amy's basically exploiting the sociopath's most reliable maxim. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights {...} a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

{from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens}In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with...

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own...

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along...

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and...

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know - the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of...

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken...

Popular! In America, what else matters?

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There...