Tripp

“Nothing so reminds you like the sea that the enemy of life is not death but loneliness.”
― Wayne Johnston, The Navigator of New York

“This is a place of mystery, Julián, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. . . . When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. . . . in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us . . .”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El laberinto de los espíritus

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“The perfect simplicity of salvation is broken up upon these rocks that we have built, and scattered for us to ponder and piece together in a test that tries our patience and understanding. We learn that justice may not always follow a just act, that justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected, that a miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale