“Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flowersteel, stitch, cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.”

“Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.”

“It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?”

“Beautiful flames, can destroy so many things—prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast.”

“Books are not luxuries. They are the meat and drink for the mind.”

“The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .”