What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.