A room without books is like a body without soul.

Ein Raum ohne Bücher ist wie ein Körper ohne Seele.

A day without writing was a little death.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Un hogar sin libros es como un cuerpo sin alma.

In the Village

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

Дом, в който няма книга, прилича на тяло, лишено от душа.

Une maison sans livres est comme un corps sans âme.

Without literature, life is hell.

A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.

The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.

Without the library, you have no civilization.