"It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."
"Are you happy?"
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."
"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us."