Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Evil requires no reason.
Darkness promotes speech.
Every text assumes a reader.
I wanted to live among books.
The starting point is a question.
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
One can transform a place by reading in it.
A book brings its own history to the reader.
The telling of stories creates the real world.
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
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.
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
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.
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
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.
Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
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.