“Then there were so many things to be said that they did not speak of any of them.”

“Does man not face life with a greater assurance is he believes that a benevolent providence foresees the future? And yet he must at the same time be confident that his will is free, otherwise moral support is meaningless altogether. Doctrines in themselves are not important to me, but their consequences are. For example, I urge upon men that they regard themselves as embodiments of the divine essence. If I convince them, their days are endowed with a sense of abiding significance and unturning glory. Then not all the misfortunes and degradations to which they may be subjected can take from them their feelings of oneness with angels and stars. And as for our people, persecuted and dispersed, they live under the shadow of death, cherishing a dream that is recurrently shattered by the caprice of tyrants and then dreamed again half in despair. What can enable such a people to persist except a conviction of a special relationship to God?”

“Stop," she shrieked, "stop trying to make it easier." "But we do not love each other. We never have..." "You mean," she screamed, "you have never loved me.”

“My schoolmates hurried home the way they always did, the bold kids scuffling and shouting and the timid, gawky ones yearning toward a brief return to their real lives in which they were their mamas' treasures instead of the dull, easily bullied children they impersonated at school.”

“I think you’re more an archivist than a librarian,” he said.He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They’re pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.”They like everything,” he said, “gum wrappers as much as books.” He said this with a hint of disdain.”Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,” he said, “they’re too crazy to throw anything out.””You’re right,” I said. ”I’m more of an archivist.””And I’m more of a librarian,” he said.”Can we still be friends?”

“All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.”

“Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”