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, ….

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 ord….

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

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

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 certai….

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

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read befor….

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

When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen..

Life happened because I turned the pages..

The starting point is a question..

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 ….

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

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

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen..

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 acqu….

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 ar….

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

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction t….

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 ….

Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power..