I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards- their crowns, their laurels , their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble-the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say , not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ' Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

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.

Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outline of things.

A real razão continua inescrutável - a leitura nos dá prazer. É um prazer complexo e um prazer difícil; varia de época para época e de livro para livro. Mas ele é suficiente. Na verdade, o prazer é tão grande que não se pode ter dúvidas de que sem ele o mundo seria um lugar muito diferente e muito inferior ao que é. Ler mudou, muda e continuará mudando o mundo.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.