More Book Quotes from Susan Hill

I enjoyed these bookish quotes from Howards End Is on the Landing:

Quote from Lady Eastlake: Things are written now to be read once and no more; that is, they are read as often as they deserve.  A book in old times took five years to write and was read five hundred times by five hundred people.  Now it is written in three months and read once by five hundred thousand people.  That’s the proper proportion. (p. 71)

Books help to form us.  If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?  Alice in Wonderland.  The Magic Faraway Tree.  The Hound of the Baskervilles.  The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W. H. Auden.  The Tale of Mr. Tod. Howards End.  What a strange person I must be.  But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me.  So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read.  I am my literary DNA. (p. 202)

(The picture is one I took of a statue in front of the library in Cadillac, MI.)