“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and… would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.”

“The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight…and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.”

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”

“You took out a book on blow-job technique from the British Library? They shouldn't have books like that in there!”

“The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.”

“Does it matter how long they were together that night? To lovers, an hour can last a century. But even for lovers, every hour ends.”

“She loved the smell of books, the feel of books, the look of them on the shelf.”

“Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”

“She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.”