“Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise.”

“Librarians, too, are gatekeepers -- not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination.”

“In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.”

“I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide.”

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. ”

“My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.”

“I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares.”