intellectual retreat Quotes

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, "one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world."

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Dear me, how I love a library.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.