“She had her head in a book. Like me she preferred reading about travel to actually traveling; it was so much more comfortable.”

“Travel broadens the mind. Travel shrinks the wallet. Travel shrivels the testicles.”

“Some travel to find themselves—I was travelling to get lost.”

“Italics are like a rash -- you never know whether to ignore them entirely or whether the more you attention you give the more they spread.”

“If a book falls open in a library and no one sees it, is it still writing? Or is it simply a page bearing abstract markings?”

“The books awed her by size, thickness, the staggering mass of lines and words to read before she could read all of them. Then having read all of the books must she carry in her head all that knowledge from the books? This too staggered her. "Wouldn't my head feel queer?" she asked Elder Brewster. "Wouldn't my head feel heavy carrying so much knowledge? Could any of it spill out if there was too much?”

“She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn't get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn't do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more, till it was time to go home.”