To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life.

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.

In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.

Dance in the body you have.

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it.

You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans.

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

I can definitely be tough when pushed. In relationships, you have to take a stand for who you are and how you're willing to be treated.

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.