"Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you’ve finished it, the book enters..."

“Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you’ve finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It’s both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”

- Anatole Broyard, About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, The New York Times (via bookmania)