“Adults havethe benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct.When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence andsense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense ofloss.”

“We live in secret citiesAnd we travel unmapped roads.We speak words between us that we recognizeBut which cannot be looked up.They are our words.They come from very far inside our mouths.You and I, we are the secret citizens of the cityInside us, and inside usThere go all the cars we have drivenAnd seen, there are all the peopleWe know and have known, thereAre all the places that areBut which used to be as well. This is whereThey went. They did not disappear.We each take a piece Through the eye and through the ear.It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speakIn the outside worldWe have to hope that some of that soundDoes not come out, that an armNot reach outIn place of the tongue.”

“We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man’s experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.”

“As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.”

“There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book come into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected.”

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ”