The Case of the Missing Books Quotes

“They were always there for you, books, like a small pet dog that doesn't die.”
― Ian sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“He’d read far too many books, that was Israel’s trouble.
Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’d been a bookish child, right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing, who enjoyed books without his parents’ insistence, who raced through non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide-ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone.
His expectations were sky-high, and his grasp of reality was minimal.”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“There is a terrible poignancy about a building intended for the public that is closed to the public: it feels like an insult, a riposte to all our more generous instincts, the public polity under threat, and democracy abandoned”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing,”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books