I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read.
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.
If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
Life happened because I turned the pages.
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I’ll still be with my books.
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
My books hold between their covers every story I’ve ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.