“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

“But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.And some of them―the best ones―are doors.”

“Listen to your inner voice... for it is a deep and powerful source of wisdom, beauty and truth, ever flowing through you... Learn to trust it, trust your intuition, and in good time, answers to all you seek to know will come, and the path will open before you.”

“Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and--'All right!'All books are in some way about other books.'I get it!”

“All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs”

“It's the centuries, Scarlett darling. All the life lived there, all the joy and all the sorrow, all the feasts and battles, they're in the air around and the land beneath you. It's time, years beyond our counting weighing without weight on the earth. You cannot see it or smell it or hear it or touch it, but you feel it brushing your skin and speaking without sound. Time. And mystery.”