“You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!”

“They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed for him who was no more; the symbol of his resurrection”

“Not caring for their lives' is it?Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.”

“We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.”

“And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those that come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world.”

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”