A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint…. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. – Henry David Thoreau

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. – Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs. – Henry Ward Beecher