As Stevenson so mournfully put it, that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect,and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.
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...
Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such ordainers of the universe (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries.
A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. What are you doing in Geneva? Come home, Bioy said to him. I can’t, Borges answered. And anyway,...
قراءة كتاب ليست مطابقة تماماً لقراءة شاشة، مهما كان النص.
في إحدى المناسبات سئل الحاخام ليفي اسحاق أحد كبار معلمي الحسيديين في القرن الثامن عشر عن سبب غياب الصفحة الأولى من جميع بحوث التلمود البابلي مما يدفع القارئ الى مباشرة القراءة بالصفحة الثانية. أجاب: (...
الحصيلة هي أن القارئ والكتاب يصبحان وحدةواحدةالعالم ككتاب يُلتهم من القارئ الذي هو بدوره حرف في نص العالم
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear....
Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
القناعة تعني نقصًا معينًا في الفضول.
القراءة مثل التنفس؛انها وظيفة حياتية اساسية
الإلحاح للحصول على كتاب وتملكه هو نوع من الشهوة التي لا يمكن مقارنتها بأي شهوة أخرى.
Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be
We read to find the end, for the story’s sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers, oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, ski...
We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but als...
To say I is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name con...
This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimatel...
The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a libr...
Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.
Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.