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 of life,is not of the Father, but...
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
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 scop...
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
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 banne...
Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.
Tal como os livros de Petrarca, os meus sabem infinitamente mais do que eu e agradeço-lhes por sequer tolerarem a minha presença. Por vezes, sinto que abuso desse privilégio.
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 of meanings and a...
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Darkness promotes speech.
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 o...
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.
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the m...
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 make it all the more mine.
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.
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.
الأماكن المربعة تشمل و تحلل، الأماكن الدائرية تقترح الاستمرارية.
Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is wr...