"Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts."
"A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts."
"From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story."
"In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world."
"As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing."
"Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate."
"No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly."
"But a reader's ambition knows no bounds."
"If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle."
"The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself."
"We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues."
"In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories."
"Darkness promotes speech."
"Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence."
"At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices."
"During the day, the library is a realm of order."
"The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space."
"The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more."
"Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing."
"The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned."
"Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books."
"Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order."
"Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal."