Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
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.
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.
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
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.
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
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.
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
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.
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.
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
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.
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.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
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.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
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.
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into words our most intimate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a collaborative act.
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.
Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.
…the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered ‘for bringing peace to the Middle East’ (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.
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.
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.
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.
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
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.
Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
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.
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.
Like Petrach’s, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I’m grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.