“When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.”

“Trinity’s witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked.”

“You know you're in a bad patch when the most interesting part of the book you're reading is the acknowledgments page.”

“To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.”

“School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.”

“How do those people who don't read books plug the gaps in their day? The journeys, the break-times, the evenings when the telly is crap, the time in bed before sleep arrives?”

“Too many books. . . too many fairy tales led him to believe that there was something romantic in being a soldier.”