“His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.”

“Tell him solitude is creative if he is strongand the final decisions are made in silent rooms.Tell him to be different from other peopleif it comes natural and easy being different.Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.Then he may understand Shakespeareand the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,Michael Faraday and free imaginationsBringing changes into a world resenting change.He will be lonely enoughto have time for the workhe knows as his own.”

“A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”

“He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.”

“A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.”

“The Lawyers Know Too Much THE LAWYERS, Bob, know too much.They are chums of the books of old John Marshall.They know it all, what a dead hand wrote,A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,The bones of the fingers a thin white ash. The lawyers know a dead man’s thoughts too well. In the heels of the higgling lawyers, Bob,Too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers,Too much hereinbefore provided whereas,Too many doors to go in and out of. When the lawyers are throughWhat is there left, Bob?Can a mouse nibble at itAnd find enough to fasten a tooth in? Why is there always a secret singingWhen a lawyer cashes in?Why does a hearse horse snickerHauling a lawyer away?The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue.The knack of a mason outlasts a moon.The hands of a plasterer hold a room together.The land of a farmer wishes him back again. Singers of songs and dreamers of plays Build a house no wind blows over.The lawyers—tell me why a hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer’s bones.”

“Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.”