Michael

“They say, that when I was born,
my mother taught me to suck the milk.
And every night beside my crib,
she taught me to sleep as soft as silk.
With a smile she pressed her lips to mine,
till my mouth with joy oversplit.
She took my hand and guided my foot,
till I learned to walk with a happy lilt.
One word, two words, then three and more...
that's how she taught me to talk.
That's why my life is part of her life,
and will remain so as long as I live”
― Iraj Mirza Persian Poet

“Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money.
If you approach them, they are not asleep; If you seek them, they do not hide;
If you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.”
― Richard de Bury, The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury

“To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.”
― Robertson Davies

“Let no one reduce to tears or reproach
This statement of the mastery of God,
Who, with magnificent irony, gave
Me at once both books and night

Of this city of books He pronounced rulers
These lightless eyes, who can only
Peruse in libraries of dreams
The insensible paragraphs that yield

With every new dawn. Vainly does the day
Lavish on them its infinite books,
Arduous as the arduous manuscripts
Which at Alexandria did perish.

Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us)
Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens;
I aimlessly weary at the confines
Of this tall and deep blind library.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And the West, centuries, dynasties
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies
Do walls proffer, but pointlessly.

Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade
Explore with my indecisive cane;
To think I had imagined Paradise
In the form of such a library.

Something, certainly not termed
Fate, rules on such things;
Another had received in blurry
Afternoons both books and shadow.

Wandering through these slow corridors
I often feel with a vague and sacred dread
That I am another, the dead one, who must
Have trodden the same steps at the same time.

Which of the two is now writing this poem
Of a plural I and of a single shadow?
How important is the word that names me
If the anathema is one and indivisible?

Groussac or Borges, I see this darling
World deform and extinguish
To a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and oblivion”
― Jorge Luis Borges