That was the thing about books, she was realizing; they could take you somewhere else entirely, it was true. but it wasn't the same thing as actually going there yourself.

Who wants to be used? I love to read, so books are my main friends. They're always available, always friendly, and always interesting, and they never make me choose sides.

My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

هناك كتب .. غلافـها أفضل ما فيها

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.

I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

Books are worse than wine, I say. You read one and you need another - there's no end to it. What ails you that you cannot content yourself with just living on under the sun?

..through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

A book on war is useful, but it’d be even more useful if it could shoot bullets. Or stop them. Or stop illiteracy. Oh, If only Congress could read what they sign into law.

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.