If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

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.

Darkness promotes speech.

Evil requires no reason.

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 scope.

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.