“Books are memory. They remember their contents and pass them on. They keep track of who claims ownership, who they were given by and for what occasion. They mediate, in their margins, disagreements between reader and author.”

“The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.”

“And try to remember what we discussed, Susannah. A mediator is someone who helps others resolve conflicts. Not someone who, er, kicks them in the face.”

“[Roland] Barthes turned the thable on the author, saying no only the a book needs a reader to wake it into life, but that in so doing the reader becomes nothing less that the author, who reveals in the book's hermeneutic possibilities, releases them and so becomes its own creator.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.”