There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.

Distance can ruin even the best of intentions.

But I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

Distance just adds a richness you would not otherwise get.

People come. People go. They will drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book.

When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their stories and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones. Not the ones from the past.

But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

Home is so far from home.

As surely as the town of Rochelle is Protestant I can see you now becoming impatient. The covers of my book are between your relentless palms. A single hint of insolence on this page, the faintest shine of gloating over all these delays, and you will slam the volume shut - don't claim I can't predict it!

I admire from a distance. Too close and the flaws form a craterous landscape and the charm is lost. Who do you think I am, Neil Armstrong?

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.

Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning from satiety if nothing else

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.