I Murdered My Library Quotes

“You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“The books, as I have already said, are a library. In a library, you do not read a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you return.
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I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“The important fittings were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings. They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Richard Neville’s Playpower. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“When I was young, boys invited in for sex would examine your bookshelves.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“Reading wasn’t my religion – it was my oxygen.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. The next generation don’t want old books – they don’t seem to want books at all.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“I was the girl whose face fell when she saw a wrapped present in the shape of a box, perhaps a jigsaw puzzle. Worst of all, that preparation for the future slave-house of motherhood, a doll. I only wanted book tokens or books themselves – but better a book token. The worst present is the book you don’t want to read.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“The glory of the library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

“Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature?”
― Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library