“...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.”

“The tale is, in large part, our capital. I was nourished on tales...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.”

“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ”

“They do not disappear when they die. They leave us their strength.”

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

“Instead, Emerson came to accept that when someone dies, things that belong to you disappear, too.”