“I felt the heat of the animosity they bear towards me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbour in a fire as if he were a banned book...for what is the difference? Every book is imbued with the human spirit.”

“And I would have answered:"The knottier the branch, the more twisted and misshapen, the more bent people called it, the harder it is to find it a place among the smooth planks, the more people agree that it should be thrown on the fire, the more useless it is, the more unsuitable for anything except letting one's imagination run riot, the more I covet it, the more I yearn to weigh it in my hand, the more I long to let my whittling knife be guided by its knots and veins...Yes, bring that piece to me...”

“Balderdash, I say, let the sword turn into an adder and the adder a salmon and the salmon a birch twig and birch twig a sword and the sword a tongue...Let it all run together so swiftly that it cannot be separated again...”

“They are the lost books,” he turned his head, grasping his cane and raising it aloft, as if speaking more to the books than to me. “The destroyed books, the burnt books, the missing, the stolen, the drowned, the forgotten. Those ruined by water, fire, mold, man’s malice or neglect or, perchance…time itself. They’re all here, every last one, Darius. At least for a time.”

“Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.”

“You could start a fire with the heat between you two.""You're mistaking bitter animosity for heartfelt affection.”

“He fed his spirit with the bread of books”