“What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?”

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. ”

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”

“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”

“No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.”

“What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.”

“The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”