... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.