Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. – Henry Ward Beecher

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead. – Van Wyck Brooks

Psychopathia librorum…. I surround myself with the printed word. – Sven Birkerts (b.1951), “Notes from a Confession,” The Agni Review, No.22 (1985)

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. – George Robert Gissing