“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning.”

— Borges

The whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader.

“As I write this book I think of my mind as a battleground of ideas. There are far more of them than can possibly find their way on to the final printed pages. ‘I’ am not an independent conscious entity creating the ideas out of nowhere. Rather, this brain has picked up millions of memes from all its education, reading, and long hours of thinking, and they are all fermenting in there as the fingers type.”

— Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)

“Although we are by all odds the most social of all social animals—more interdependent, more attached to each other, more inseparable in our behavior than bees—we do not often feel our conjoined intelligence. Perhaps, however, we are linked in circuits for the storage, processing, and retrieval of information, since this appears to be the most basic and universal of all human enterprises.”

— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.’

— Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929)