“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”

“[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop… You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!”

“I now bid you a welcome adoo.”

“Thoughts that cannot survive the open air and that evaporate as soon as we take them out of the room. To put them to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where you found them, they do not endure.”

“If any of you ever go into the pulpit "simply upon the cold legs of custom," be very careful to take a manuscript with you. But if you go to speak to the assembly because your mind is full of the truth, and you long to impart that truth to them, for their sake and for God's sake, — then charge your mind with it, and speak with all the force you can give it, without any notes.”

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —& they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.”

“Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple.”

“When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ.”

“I am Dracula…. I bid you welcome.”