Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom