Heidi Polk

“bibliobibuli” – There are people who read too much, bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. (H.L. Mencken’s “Notebook 71,” 1956)

A word after a word after a word is power. (Margaret Atwood)

Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind. (Joe Queenan)

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world. (Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie)