A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.

We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.

Cartea a dovedit ce poate, și nu vedem un alt obiect mai bun pe care l-am putea crea pentru aceeași întrebuințare.

In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Με άλλα λόγια, κάθε βιβλίο ήταν γι' αυτόν σαν ένα μυθικό ζώο που συναντούσε σε μια άγνωστη χώρα.

The lamp fell right on the pile of books that had been knocked from the table all in a heap, lying open. The oil spilled out, the fire immediately seized a fragile parchment, which blazed up like a bundle of dry twigs. Everything happened in a few moments, as for centuries those ancient pages had been yearning for arson and were rejoicing in the sudden satisfaction of an immemorial thirst for ecpyrosis.

مَن يقرأ الكتب التي تتحدث عنها الصُّحُف ؟في العادةِ لا يقرؤُها حتىٰ مَن كتب عنها ، إلّا مَن كتبها ، وَ ليس ذلك مؤكَّدًا ، وَ عند قراءة بعض الكتب يبدو أحيانًا أنّ كاتبها لم يقرأها

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.