#reading

"We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too."

"Don't die without fulfilling your purpose."

"You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being."

"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."

"Don't set your goals by what other people deem important."

"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness."

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

"If I could convert books to wine, I’d start with The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve never read it, but maybe tonight I’ll be thirsty enough."

"We live for books."

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."

"When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved."

"As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate."