“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 . . .”

“They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.”

“Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation.”

“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 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 Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.”