“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”

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

“The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.”

“Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after the first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on.”

“This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.”

“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.”

“... to lend a book is an incitement to theft."A Reader on Reading p. 281”