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.