“An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s voice resonated in the reader’s head with the same words that had resonated in his own as he wrote them. He spoke to the reader from the past. What he had witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered would live forever. You only had to turn a page to travel in time.”

“He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.”

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

“He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser, and for a long time you will wonder what happened and what you did wrong. And if another of his kind comes knocking on your door, will you open it?-From an essay signed "A psychopath in prison”

“He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land.”

“But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.”