“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.”

“What I have written will bring no change to our textbooks or to the education system which produces them. Few will read this book. Fewer will remember it after reading it. Our own little stubborn world will go on as it has been going on for 45 years.”

“The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."

(, 3 October 1892)”

“We read with our ears”

“Books don’t have a nutritional value. Which is to say, we don’t just read "good" books because they’re good for us. We read to expand our horizons, to understand and connect with something outside ourselves, good and bad. We read to challenge ourselves…”

“When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.”

“Books are the greatest and the most satisfactory of recreations. I mean the use of books for pleasure. Without books, without having acquired the power of reading for pleasure, none of us can be independent, but if we can read we have a sure defence against boredom in solitude.”

“The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.”

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”

“If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible … it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books.”