“A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.”

“I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.”

“Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.”

“It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.”

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”

“On her ideal dinner party: 'Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and Charles Lamb would have to be there. I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb - she and I would do the cooking. Of course my brother would be there. I think that's about enough. That number would sustain a single conversation. Virginia and I would be the centre of attention.”

“...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.”