Hugo Hamilton | Irish-German writer

"In the library, they have a cataloguing system, whereby you can see the names of previous readers marked on a sheet at the back of the book along with the return date. Many of the books on history I borrow have already been taken out by my father while he was alive. His name is there like a forerunner. His hands turn the pages for me. In one of the books I found his posthumous train ticket, punched five days a week. It gives me the confidence of a man whose mistakes have already been made in advance."

A passage from Hugo Hamilton’s novel Dublin Palms, describing the library at the Goethe-Institut.  

My best wishes to the Goethe institute for the next 60 years!