“I've never understood the desire for books with matched bindings. You don't go through life looking for sets of matched people, and books are just as individual.”

“Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.”

“My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.”

“It may be true that you can't judge a book by its cover," Daisy G. had told Blister just last summer. "But the cover tells you something about the book and don't ever pretend it doesn't.”

“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.”

“[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.”