I don’t remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
One can transform a place by reading in it.
The starting point is a question.
At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book’s definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.
Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...
The shelves of books we haven’t written, like those of books we haven’t read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library’s farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.