"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration."

"Poets…are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams…not yet made accessible to science."

"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists…When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."