Time & Perspective Quote by William Lyon Phelps

Phelps turns a genteel vice - loving books - into a small, sharp tragedy of class. The line starts with a moral twist: the bibliophile "of little means" doesn’t suffer because reading is difficult, or because he lacks discipline. He suffers because the market has weaponized his desire. That inversion is the engine of the quote: what should be intimate and steady ("Books don't slip from his hands") becomes kinetic and humiliating ("fly past him through the air"). You can almost see the shop window: the object of devotion lifted out of reach, not by censorship or ignorance, but by price tags.

The imagery is slyly cruel. Books become birds: beautiful, alluring, alive with promise. But they’re also unreachable, and their flight is propelled by economics, not nature. Phelps pairs "high as birds" with "high as prices" to compress romance and arithmetic into one motion; the dream of culture and the reality of scarcity share the same altitude. It’s a joke that lands because it isn’t quite a joke - it’s the sting of recognizing a social arrangement that calls itself civilized while quietly rationing its civilization.

Context matters: Phelps was a prominent American educator in an era when mass literacy and public libraries were expanding, yet cultural prestige still clung to ownership. The quote defends reading as aspiration while indicting a world where access can depend on disposable income. The subtext is a challenge to the gatekeepers: if books are meant to elevate, why do we keep pricing flight into them?