“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”

“Come with me,' Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.”

“My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.”

“Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).”

“It is like having a book out from the library.It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”