Interesting Quotes:

• "The stable hierarchies of the printed page -- one of the defining norms of that [slower] world -- are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly-minted circuits." (p. 3)

• "... books are a place away from the routine, a place associated with dreams and fantasies." (p. 29)

• "I remember so clearly the shock I would feel whenever I looked up from the vortex of the page and faced the strangely immobile wold around me. My room, the trees outside the window -- everything seemed so dense, so saturated with itself. Never since have I known it so intensely, this colliding of realities, the current of mystery leaping the gap between them." (p. 37)

• "... to be a writer was not just to produce words -- books -- as other professionals produce car designs or legal agreements. Rather, it was to position oneself independently, at an angle to society; it was to live in a different and possibly dangerous way in the service of a vision." (p. 41)

• "Newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere -- surround us, indeed, to the point of having turned our waking environment into a palimpsest of texts to be read, glanced at, or ignored. It is startling to recall the anecdote about the philosopher Erasmus pausing on a muddy thoroughfare to study a rare scrap of printed paper flickering at his feet." (p. 71)

• "In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of text, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await." (p. 72)

• "The transition from the world we live in to the world of the book is complex and gradual. We do not open to the first page and find ourselves instantly transported from our surroundings and concerns. What happens is a gradual immersion, an exchange in which we hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the book." (p. 81)

• "Fully engaged, we work with the writer to build our own book. We preside over the movements in a world that comes into view and vanishes, present into past, just like the one we inhabit when the book is shut." (p. 83)

• "Our real experiences, and hence our memories, are also influenced by what we carry with us from books ... No less exalting is the sensation of inner and outer worlds coinciding, going on simultaneously, or very nearly so ... We feel the sense of two worlds -- the real and the textual -- in still other ways when we engage a work over a longer period ... we are not simply alternating between zones, between life and book. We live in both at once, only at varying levels of simultaneous awareness." (p. 98)