In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected – as far as statistics show – the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues.
As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
I’ve never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn’t, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn’t come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
The readers who commited suicide after reading ‘Werther’ were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don’t know that I am their reader.
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.
Every text assumes a reader.
Darkness promotes speech.
Evil requires no reason.