“Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.”

“When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing masses of the damned, among whom I must expect to spend eternity.”

“A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.”

“Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.”

“My mother was an excellent woman. Pious, virtuous. Kind. But she was not the intellectual equal of my father. Not by any means. I do not speak of book learning. I speak of a certain innate quality of mind, a superior understanding. Because she had it not, their companionship was - diminished. Father looked to his books, rather than to his wife.”

“I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book.”

“The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.”