“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.”

“The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided - constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.”

“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.”

“Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

“If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ”

“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria.”

“It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers.”