Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it’s for life.

She loves you, loathes you, treats you well, then ill. Like a leech or a surgeon's knife, she's double-edged: sometimes she'll cure, but sometimes she will kill.

he looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.

I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things.

What about the future?" "We'll talk about the future when it gets here.

Actually loneliness has a kind of fascination; it's a state of egotistical, inner grace that you can achieve only by standing guard on old, forgotten roads that no one travels anymore.

Of all the universal lies she accepted unquestioningly, the happy ending was the most absurd. The hero and heroine lived happily ever after, and the ending seemed indisputable, definitive. No questions asked about how long love or happiness lasts in that 'forever' that can be divided into lifetimes, years, months. Even days