“O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.”

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”

“We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.”

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”

“The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again. And even of the books we decide to read, there are almost always large portions which do not concern us, and which we are sure to forget the day after we have read them. The art is to skip all that does not concern us, while missing nothing that we really need. No external guidance can teach us this; for nobody but ourselves can guess what the needs of our intellect may be.”

“People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.”