books

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.

Disease often comes with a smiling face.

Nobility is not only in forgiveness.

It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life__f that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.

Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

Love is almost never simple.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.

They were...no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved.

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn__ match reality.

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

These two oo in "book" are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

People perish. Books are immortal.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.