Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.