I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. Ernest Hemingway I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. J. D. Salinger Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. No one has stepped twice into the same river.