Luci

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“If it was true what her mother had once told her, then nothing rang the telephone like death in the middle of the night.”
― Edward P Jones

“The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West

“Therefore, it is necessary to guard our heart and our external senses from indecent spectacles: each of us becomes what we see, what we listen to, and what we read.”
― Fr Gabriele Amorth, An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels