““And suddenly, having waited so long to hold it in my hands, I felt paralyzed to read it. Certainly, I was unable to read it like any normal manuscript - starting with page 1, then moving to page 2, 3, and so on. I was seized with a terrifying feeling that here in my possession was something that could do me physical harm the longer I held on to it - a radioactive item - even though my mind continued to reassure me it was just an inert, dead stack of papers. And so, out of rapacious curiosity or immobilizing fear, I undertook to devour the entire thing at once, thumbing through pages and skimming my eyes haphazardly over random words.””
![“It hardly mattered to him that [his] book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial...He let his fingers riffle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive… The fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved…” quote by John Williams](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ffd/john-williams-3311_books_it-hardly-mattered-to-him-that-his-book_1311508.jpg)
