In A Library, No Empty Shelf Remains

One Can Transform A Place By Reading In It.

I Like To Imagine That, On The Day After My Last, My Library And I Will Crumble Together, So That Even When I Am No More I'll Still Be With My Books.

If The Book Is Second-hand, I Leave All Its Markings Intact, The Spoor Of Previous Readers, Fellow-travellers Who Have Recorded Their Passage By Means Of Scribbled Comments, A Name On The Fly-leaf, A Bus Ticket To Mark A Certain Page.

At One Magical Instant In Your Early Childhood, The Page Of A Book—that String Of Confused, Alien Ciphers—shivered Into Meaning. Words Spoke To You, Gave Up Their Secrets; At That Moment, Whole Universes Opened. You Became, Irrevocably, A Reader.

And Sometimes, When The Stars Are Kind, We Read With An Intake Of Breath, With A Shudder, As If Someone Or Something Had 'walked Over Our Grave,' As If A Memory Had Suddenly Been Rescued From A Place Deep Within Us - The Recognition Of Something We Never Knew Was There, Or Of Something We Vaguely Felt As A Flicker Or A Shadow, Whose Ghostly Form Rises And Passes Back Into Us Before We Can See What It Is, Leaving Us Older And Wiser.