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 cluster or...
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.
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.
I wanted to live among books.
I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't requ...
I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
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 m...
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 sort...
أصبحت كتبي هي موطني الثابت الوحيد، حيث كنت أستطيع أن أتحرك داخلها في أي وقت أشاء، وحسب ما تشتهيه رغباتي وميولي.
The thing is, I don’t know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else’s. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagin...
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.
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may...
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe...
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is create...
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.
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.