Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.

Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.