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“Proust asserted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, “what the intellect offers us under the name of the past is not the past. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“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

“the fact that you’ll never know what sort of person you might have been if you’d read different stuff”
― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

“To the ancient Greeks, myths were the same as history—they believed that all of the fantastical events in them had really happened once upon a time. The myths were their way of making sense of the past, even as far back as how the world was created.”
― Jean Menzies, Greek Myths: Meet the Heroes and Heroines, Monsters and Gods of Ancient Greece