"The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy."

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

"Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous."

"Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid."

"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more."