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

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

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.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.

I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

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.