“I detest a quarto. Capt. Pasley's book is too good for their society. They will not understand a man who condenses his thoughts into an octavo.”

Playfully favouring intellectual economy over ponderous presentation · Letter to Cassandra Austen, February 1813

• Books
• Humour
• Style

“I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London.”

Her affectionate response to receiving a newly printed copy of Pride and Prejudice · Letter to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813

• Books
• Love
• Writing

“I don't take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books.”

Contrasting the numb routine of casualty administration with a future reckoning through literature · Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, 10 October 1918

• Books
• Death
• War

“Everything in the world exists to culminate in a book.”

Original: Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre. — Distils Mallarmé’s belief in literature as a gathering point for experience and the world. · Le Livre, instrument spirituel, 1895; collected in Divagations, 1897 (French)

• Books
• Literature
• Writing

“Great are my riches.”

Her delighted response to receiving a large gift of books, revealing how readily she measured wealth in reading · Letter to an Oberlin friend, 1874

• Books
• Gratitude
• Reading

“There is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library.”

Celebrating the familiar comforts of home, books and private work · Letter to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 11 January 1808

• Books
• Home
• Simplicity

“I firmly believe that the health of autograph hunters, as a class, is excellent.”

A dry punchline to Aldrich's suspicion of collectors who pleaded illness to obtain authors' signatures · Essay, The Autograph Hunter, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Books
• Humour
• Wit

“No author is insensible to the compliment involved in a request for his autograph, assuming the request to come from some sincere lover of books and bookmen.”

Distinguishing genuine literary admiration from collecting driven merely by acquisition · Essay, The Autograph Hunter, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Books
• Fame
• Literature

“Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains.”

Gently mocking the tendency to honour canonical books more often than actually read them · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

• Books
• Humour
• Reading

“The fool and his bookplate are soon parted.”

A bibliophile's joke about destroying the meaning of ownership marks by distributing them as collectibles · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

• Books
• Humour
• Wit

“To live continually with noble books, with high-erected thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy, teaches the soul good manners.”

Celebrating the moral and civilising influence of sustained reading · Essay collection, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Books
• Character
• Reading

“A man is known by the company his mind keeps.”

Suggesting that the ideas and books we inhabit help reveal and form our character · Essay collection, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Books
• Character
• Mind

“Books are my only refuge, which I seek not from choice but from necessity, and I try to allay a burning breast with hard intellectual labour.”

Describing reading and intellectual work as a refuge from emotional isolation · Letter to Laurence Binyon, March 1889

• Books
• Solitude
• Work

“The great art of the world is found in books that are familiar to millions, if not the world over, then, at any rate, down several ages of several continents.”

Enduring and widespread readership is presented as one sign of artistic greatness · The English Novel

• Art
• Books
• Time

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

Ford’s celebrated test for judging a book from a representative page · Critical maxim, commonly attributed

• Books
• Criticism
• Reading

“Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation.”

Celebrating books as gifts that carry thought across generations · The Improvement of the Mind

• Books
• Memory
• Time

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds.”

Celebrating reading as a way of entering other minds · Essay

• Books
• Poetry