They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.