“Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.”

“To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.”

“We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not...”

“Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.”

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.”

“The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.”

“A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses...”

“Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, howe...”

“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last...”

“The world is quiet here.”

“I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.”

“All I wanted was to be a university teacher.”