“...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”

“I don't think we ever find anything, do we? I mean in life. We think we find things and then it turns out those things aren't what we thought.”

“Do we always do the things that God would take pleasure, or that we do things we think God would take pleasure.”

“We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.”

“We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.”