Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

“And so when I returned to Ulsgaard in this frame of mind and saw all the books, I fell upon them: in a great hurry, almost with a bad conscience. Somehow I had a premonition of what I've so often felt in later life: that you didn't have the right to open one book if you weren't prepared to read them all. Wich every line you made a break in the world. Before books, it was whole, and perhaps after them it would be whole again. But how could I, who didn't know how to go about reading, take them all on? There they stood, even in this modest library, hopelessly outnumbering me, shoulder to shoulder in closed ranks. Defiant and desperate, I plunged from book to book and fought through the pages like someone who has to perform a task out of all proportion to his strength.”

“In later years I would sometimes wake up at night and the stars would be standing there so real and advancing with such clarity of purpose that I couldn't understand how people inured themselves to so much world. I had a similar feeling, I think, when I'd glance up from my books and look outside—where the summer was, where Abelone was calling from.”