Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

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.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

Anxiety is fear of one's self.

To me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

As I die, and my life flashes before my eyes, I want to see who made faces at me when I turned my head. That's all I want to see.

Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

When you think that the road has ended, you must know that it is your ability to go beyond has ended, not the road!

He who enjoys a good neighbor, said the Greeks, has a precious possession. Same goes for neighbour's wife.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.