“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...”

“We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.”

“The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.”

“If they've managed to bring more firepower than us, we deserve to lose. But we aren't going to lose, because we're the Page sisters and we're librarians.”

“Historically, dust jackets are a new concern for authors; you don't see them much before the 1920s. And dust jacket is a strange name for this contrivance, as if books had anything to fear from dust. If you store a book properly, standing up, then the jacket doesn't cover the one part of the book that is actually exposed to dust, which is the top of the pages. So a dust jacket is no such thing at all; it is really a sort of advertising wrapper, like the brown paper sheath on a Hershey's bar. On this wrapper goes the manufacturer's name, the ingredients--some blithering about unforgettable characters or gemlike prose or gripping narrative--and a brief summation of who does what to whom in our gripping, unforgettable, gemlike object.”

“We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the worldbecause we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”