My hunger for books was constant.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The sp...
We were both lone twins.
The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of...
Politeness. Being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
My job is not to sell the books - my father does that - but to them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though the...
Ivan Lea
Aurelius Alphonse Love.
As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices...
A few paces behind, I followed him.
That. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life,
Why do you come here, Aurelius?
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the grav...
Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White. Middlemarch,
I’m sorry, I heard her say. One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
I’d expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.
It’s what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that’s too heavy. So. My story is a heavy one.
It was like living entirely inside a book.
I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.