I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much? And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.

Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -- low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

In 1969 I published a small book on Humility. It was a pioneering work which has not, to my knowledge, been superceded.

Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome.

There is no such thing as control of a situation. If we try to do this, it turns back on us in negativity.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Self-control is the only possible road to character development

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

It's frightening that skepticism has to be a movement, because you're just arguing that reality is reality. What a waste of energy, in a way.

I'm not superwoman. It's impossible to do everything 100 percent all of the time. And suggesting that women should be able to do it only puts more pressure on them.

Racism is still alive they just be concealing it

You've just got to get in the starting gate and throw down whatever you've got.