“Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.”

“Have they all bought Kindles? I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! - but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through.”

“Maybe I'll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I'll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait- is that weird? It's an expensive book. Maybe there's a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That's stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?)”

“[...] We keep a record for every member, and for every customer who might yet become a member, in order to track their work." He paused, then added, "Some of them are working very hard indeed." "What are they doing?""My boy," he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading.”

“Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.”

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

“Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”