"Books externalise our brains and turn our..." - Quote by John Updike

“It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.”

“Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.”

“We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.”

“Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.”

“I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.”

“Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.”

“Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!”

“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.”

“Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us.”