[R]eading time is still limited no matter how many commitments of work or friendship I am willing to ditch in favor of the pages. – Francis Spufford (b.1964), “Confessions of an English Fiction Eater,” The Child

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Through all of my youth these books were my companions, and now, as I write these lines, after sixty years, they still look down upon me with their old friendliness. – James L. Whitney, “Reminiscences of an Old Librarian,” November 1909