“The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.”

“Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.”

“In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets.”

“Each reader of the same text, like each lover of the same woman (or the other way around), modulates that text, transforms that lover, finds in it/her/him something that has never been discovered before. ”

“The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.”

“In this age of one-night stands, virtual relationships and text sex, a wedding was a modern miracle.”