“I drink to not giving a damn . . .”

“I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.”

“I read Borges, Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him . . . he was a blind man who see better than anyone”

“He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was . . .”

“I didn't know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.”

“I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.”

“The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become”