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.

Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.

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...

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

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.

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

…the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years...

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered,...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

…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...

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

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...

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.

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.

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...