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

“In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them .... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.”

“Libraries are full of ghosts, books being the most haunted things of all.”

“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.”

“The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.”

“In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.”