“This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself.”

“The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.”

“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. ”

“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ”

“I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.”

“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.”

“We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.”