Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic...

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.

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.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

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...

Geschichten sind unser Gedächtnis, Bibliotheken die Lagerstätten für dieses Gedächtnis und Lesen das Handwerk, mit dem wir dieses Gedächtnis neu erschaffen können, indem wir es rezitieren und glossieren, es wieder in unsere eigene Erfahrung rückübersetzen...

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.

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.

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

I wanted to live among books.

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...

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.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

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.

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...

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror–at the...

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.

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.

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.

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

But a reader’s ambition knows no bounds.

Darkness promotes speech.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars...

Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.

…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...

The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.

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 stories that unfold in the space of a writer’s study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections...

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had ‘walked over our grave,’ as if a memory had suddenly been rescued...

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

We can imagine the books we’d like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well...

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride...

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...

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.

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.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common...

Die Freunde, an die ich denke, sind in der Zeit gefangen wie in einem Film. Sie (viele von ihnen sind tot, verschollen) sind in dem Alter, in dem ich sie zuletzt gesehen habe; ich bezweifle,...

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...

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

Systematisches Lesen ist kaum von Nutzen. Offizielle Bücherlisten (der Klassiker, der Literaturgeschichte, der zensurierten oder empfohlenen Bücher, der Bibliothekskataloge) können per Zufall den einen oder anderen nützlichen Hinweis geben. Die beste Anleitung bieten persönliche Launen...

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You...

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of...

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.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which...

Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hätte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt.

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...

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.