Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

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.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

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 sorts.