To marry was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players.

...one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.

The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.

But I was a lonely creature, and although I would have been very happy to have a friend I just never happened to meet one.

He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.

There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell.

Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the life of your betters.

Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.

Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order.

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense.

An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed - and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.

Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

No action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. It's obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?

You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!

God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.