"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality."

“The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.”

“Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.”

“In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.”

“Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.”

“I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.”

“The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.”