Vivir es pasarse el tiempo llenando los dos platos de la balanza.

Amare vuol dire, in ultima analisi, far dono delle nostre preferenze a coloro che preferiamo.

Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding – or wanting to admit – that what a child learns first isn’t the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.

We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little – set time, set gestures – was like a prayer.

A child has no great wish to perfect himself in the use of an instrument of torture, but make it a means to his pleasure, and soon you will not be able to keep him from it.

La lettura, atto di comunicazione? Ecco un’altra simpatica frottola da commentatori! Quel che noi leggiamo, lo taciamo.

Il trattato di Versailles ha prodotto dei tedeschi vessati che hanno prodotto degli ebrei erranti che fabbricano dei palestinesi erranti che fabbricano delle vedove erranti incinte dei vendicatori di domani...

Rather than allowing a book’s intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it’s doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!

If reading isn’t about communication, it is, in the end, about sharing. But a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing.

We human beings build houses because we’re alive, but we write books because we’re mortal. We live in groups because we’re sociable, but we read because we know we’re alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one’s place, but that no one can replace either.