“His eyes gravitated towards the wall-to-wall bookshelf at one end of the room. 'You folks like books, I see.”

“Misery is a dead end that stops at a brick wall. If you want to escape it, you must back out carefully, never taking your eyes off the wall. That way, it looks as though the wall is receding.”

“Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.”

“In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.”

“You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!”

“But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”