“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”

“You can cover a great deal of country in books. ”

“In the old stories, despite the impossibility of the incidents, the interest is always real and human.  The princes and princesses fall in love and marry--nothing could be more human than that.  Their lives and loves are crossed by human sorrows...The hero and heroine are persecuted or separated by cruel stepmothers or enchanters; they have wanderings and sorrows to suffer; they have adventures to achieve and difficulties to overcome; they must display courage, loyalty and address, courtesy, gentleness and gratitude.  Thus they are living in a real human world, though it wears a mythical face, though there are giants and lions in the way.  The old fairy tales which a silly sort of people disparage as too wicked and ferocious for the nursery, are really 'full of matter,' and unobtrusively teach the true lessons of our wayfaring in a world of perplexities and obstructions.”

“And he married the Echo one fortunate morn,And Woman, their beautiful daughter, was born!The daughter of Sunshine and Echo she cameWith a voice like a song, with a face like a flame;With a face like a flame, and a voice like a song,And happy was Man, but it was not for long!For weather's a painfully changeable thing,Not always the child of the Echo would sing;And the face of the Sun may be hidden with mist,And his child can be terribly cross if she list.And unfortunate man had to learn with surpriseThat a frown's not peculiar to masculine eyes;That the sweetest of voices can scold and sneer,And cannot be answered - like men - with a spear”

“Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?”

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.”