It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

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

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.