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“To him it was wild and extravagant, a life that was panoplied and trampling compared with his own: it seemed to him that in their schooldays they had won more than he would ever win during the whole of his life. At first ill-treated, they had lived to be oppressors whose savagest desire could be gratified at once, which was surely the height of ambition. As the picture grew in his mind, he ornamented it with little marginal additions, until in the end the thing was as unreal as a highly-coloured picture of an ancient battle, but he had no inkling of its untruth, and he looked on them with curious respect. The pimply Eddy; Christopher, dark and unshaven as a boxer; the selfish and smiling Patrick, and even Tony Braithwaite—all took on a picturesqueness in his eyes, as if they were veterans of an old war.”
― Jill
― Jill
“Then if there was no difference between love fulfilled and love unfulfilled, how could there be any difference between any other pair of opposites? Was he not freed, for the rest of his life, from choice?
For what could it matter? Let him take this course, or this course, but still behind the mind, on some other level, the way he had been rejected was being simultaneously worked out and the same conclusion was being reached. What did it matter which road he took if they both led to the same place? He looked at the tree-tops in the wind. What control could he hope to have over the maddened surface of things?”
― Jill
For what could it matter? Let him take this course, or this course, but still behind the mind, on some other level, the way he had been rejected was being simultaneously worked out and the same conclusion was being reached. What did it matter which road he took if they both led to the same place? He looked at the tree-tops in the wind. What control could he hope to have over the maddened surface of things?”
― Jill
“The stories I have discussed, which might be taken to be about reading and memory, are in fact explorations of the relationship between memory and forgetfulness. A relationship expressed through objects, volumes that are containers, the result of a kind of handicraft we call books that we read as remnants, as ruins of the texture of the past, of their ideas that survive. Because it is the fate of what is whole to be reduced to parts, to fragments, chaotic lists and examples that are still legible." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History”
― Bookshops: A Reader's History
― Bookshops: A Reader's History
“We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?”
― The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
― The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
“Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world. It is not a flight path, but rather the corridor between bookshelves that unites your country and its language with vast regions that speak other languages. It is not an international frontier you must cross but a footstep--a mere footstep--you must take to change topography, toponyms and time: a volume first published in 1976 sits next to one launched yesterday, which has just arrived; a monograph on prehistoric migrations cohabits with a study of the megalopolis in the twentieth-first century; the complete works of Camus precede those of Cervantes (it is in that unique, reduced space where the line by J.V. Foix rings truest: "The new excites and the old seduces"). It is not a main road, but rather a set of stairs, perhaps a threshold, maybe not even that: turn and it is what links one genre to another, a discipline or obsession to an often complementary opposite; Greek drama to great North American novels, microbiology to photography, Far Eastern history to bestsellers about the Far West, Hindu poetry to chronicles of the Indies, entomology to chaos theory." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History”
― Bookshops: A Reader's History
― Bookshops: A Reader's History
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