...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos.

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.