“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

“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.”

“We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.”

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

“There is nothing,” Naudé wrote, “that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader.” These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-progress, and every empty shelf announces the books to come.”

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

“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.”