Quotes from Sheridan Hay

There's so much love sent through the mail.

Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation.

the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge.)

Peculiar to Sydney, in those days, was a single word written in chalk in beautiful, looping copperplate on street corners. Sydney was known for it, the word chalked at the feet of the inhabitants and visitors, like a letter consisting of a lone word, but personally addressed to each member of a crowd. . . . It says 'Eternity,' love. . . . A man has been writing that word in chalk for thirty years. It's famous now.

Looking up into the trees, I noticed that one still had a few dark leaves clinging to the upper branches. Under my gaze, the leaves became a semé of birds, scattering upward and away in a salutary swoop, leaving only a plastic bag, caught and hanging listlessly in the bare limbs.

book collecting is only meaningful if it's personal," Oscar clarified. "If it's just another way of accumulating wealth instead of for the books themselves it isn't right. Collectors are trying to protect themselves. To separate themselves. It's a hierarchy.

Die Bücher, die wie auf unserem ersten Bücherregal als Erwachsene stehen haben, erzählen von unseren Vorhaben.

some letters one really writes to oneself; some letters just describe what it is we hope will be returned.

He lit his pipe, and the match head in that room of paper and leather flared up like an idea.

Los títulos que forman nuestra primera biblioteca de adultos son la piedra basal de aquello en que deseamos convertirnos.

I had the sense that cities were yielding, that they moved over and made room.

As a reader of fables, she must have recognized that I would need one of my own. . . . she knew a city would be the cure to the small life I had lived, the one I'd lost.

no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear.

Do you know what the common name for Chardonnet silk is? . . . Rayon. . . . Made from extruded wood pulp. Not silk at all.

I . . . watched the storm through an amnion of water.

To a true collector, the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth," Oscar quoted, absent self-consciousness.

Our business is to find homes for books with the hope they will be loved as we have loved them. My heart is broken every day I make a sale; then renewed again by the arrival of an unexpected replacement. I keep learning to love again.

A book was like a drawer: one opened it and notions flew out.

La sospecha siempre ronda las mentes culpables.

And when I think of my few acquisitions, I have to admit how fiercely the autodidact struggles for her education, and how incomplete that education remains. How illusory is any accumulation of knowledge!

Secrets were pernicious and I wanted nothing to do with them.

You might want to consider the whole thing from a man's perspective. One's own point of view, Rosemary, is inevitably limited.

Just an idea." He waved a thick hand. "I think Auden meant that whenever there's a gift there's a guilty secret, a thorn in the flesh. Both things are given at once, and the nature of one depends on the other.

Have you contracted that special illness of the ear — verse?