I've Never Really Understood Attachment To A

In Our Day, Computer Technology And The Proliferation Of Books On Cd-rom Have Not Affected - As Far As Statistics Show - The Production And Sale Of Books In Their Old-fashioned Codex Form.

From Fire, Water, The Passage Of Time, Neglectful Readers, And The Hand Of The Censor, Each Of My Books Has Escaped To Tell Me Its Story.

If Every Library Is In Some Sense A Reflection Of Its Readers, It Is Also An Image Of That Which We Are Not, And Cannot Be.

And Sometimes, When The Stars Are Kind, We Read With An Intake Of Breath, With A Shudder, As If Someone Or Something Had 'walked Over Our Grave,' As If A Memory Had Suddenly Been Rescued From A Place Deep Within Us - The Recognition Of Something We Never Knew Was There, Or Of Something We Vaguely Felt As A Flicker Or A Shadow, Whose Ghostly Form Rises And Passes Back Into Us Before We Can See What It Is, Leaving Us Older And Wiser.

There Is A Line Of Poetry, A Sentence In A Fable, A Word In An Essay, By Which My Existence Is Justified; Find That Line, And Immortality Is Assured.