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"At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction."
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"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."

"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."
Explore more quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who's sorry for a gnat or girl?"

"An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims make it impossible to be great at all."

"How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital."

"Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

"God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it."
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