“Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.”

“An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?”

“The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.”

“The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.”

“Twas in the prime of summer-time
An evening calm and cool,
And four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school:
There were some that ran and some that leapt,
Like troutlets in a pool.”

“Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.”

“Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.”

“Pleasant, summer, and slow long day;
Also pleasant to pass out of chastisement
Pleasant, the blossoms on the tops of the pear-trees;
Also pleasant, friendship with the Creator.”

“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”