"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, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

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

"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."

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

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

"Travel and idle, contemplate the future or the past of the world, dream over books and loiter at street corners, and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."

"It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one."

"The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime."

"Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her, and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: 'For her whose wishes must be obeyed' ... 'The happier Helen of our day' ... disgraceful to say, she had never read them."

"Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?"