“Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. ”

“Our parents don't know us... They can't know us. We hide ourselves from them. Once they knew everything about us and in order to escape them we keep out secrets, our private selves.”

“We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it. Our too great love for it makes us restless with fears, burdens us with cares, and exposes us to insults.”

“Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“This is the reason why our Theology is certain: because it seizes us from ourselves and places us outside ourselves.”