We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive