Rousseaus' Confession: I don't know how I learned to read. I only remember my first readings and their effect on me. It is from that time that I datemy consciousness of self. (查看原文)
Often it is a chrysalis experience and we emerge a different creature. We curl up to read, become disembodied, and might emerge re-emboied, changed. (查看原文)
Reading silently mirrored the rise of a sense of self. Just as painting developed pespctive, and sulptures of people became more individual and less stylized, humans became more self-consciouly individual. (查看原文)
For book-lovers of any gender or level in society, it's been a lonf struggle to get reading freedom, freedom in effect to explore ourselves.
What architecture we are:such rooms, attics and secret passages known only to us, and dimly. There is so much to discover, from the safety of our favorite reading place, book in hand. (查看原文)
Chapbooks were both a gateway drug to literary classics and in themselves contained shards of greatness.
An apartheid in print culture between popular and elite cannot be sustained. (查看原文)
They have provided comfort books for a troubled world. They have used the gamut of theatrical skills to sell their wares: costume and humour, speech and music.
Shakespeare' Autolucus: I understand the business. It is to have an open eye, a quick ear, and a nimble hand. (查看原文)
It seems that browsing mindlessly is somehow browsing mindfully.
Library stacks mirror the undiscovered self. In the library you can escape down a random aisle, be unprogrammable for a while, intraceable, explore other ways of being.
Browsing a library is to browsing online（jerked around by algorithms） what free climbing is.to a coach tour. (查看原文)
Anciently, goddesses were more associated with wisdom than gods: Saraswati in India, Athena in Greece, Minerva in Rome.
Women are good at peace and men are good at war. (查看原文)
Collecting is to bulid a fortress against the triviality of the outside world.
We are a fractio of ourselves, and we all have moments when that knowledge drenches us like a sudden shower of rain.
If you think stories, not dates, two thousands years is just a vibration. (查看原文)
Collectors have risked arrest, hidden books underground and behind walls, rescued them from candle-makers and pie shops, traversed the length and breadth of countries, often blown their whole fortunes, been lonely, shivered at street bookstalls week after week and sweated as auction bids edged higher and higher. They may have been eccentric and sometime obsessive, but they saw books as doors to other worlds, and to other ways of beings, and in this they helped us to be our more extraordinary selves. Very many were idealists who collected, as Cardinal Borromeo did, in the hope that 'crude centuries may not return' (查看原文)
