I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?