"I would be most content if my children grow up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
~ Anna Quindlen
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream at night, in the dusty recess of their mind, wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes to make it possible."
~ T.E. Lawrence
"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you carry away from it."
~ James Bryce
"Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book."
~ Unknown
"Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions."
~Isaac Bashevis Singer
"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
~Paul Sweeney
"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." ~Helen Exley
"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
~Mark Twain
"When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before."
~Clifton Fadiman
"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart."
~Gilbert Highet
"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."
~François Mauriac
"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."
~Ross MacDonald
"I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command."
~Francesco Petrarch
"Never judge a book by its movie."
~J.W. Eagan
" Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers."
~Charles Kingsley
"The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness."
~Holbrook Jackson
"Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves."
~Jeremy Collier
"This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication."
~Logan Pearsall Smith
"Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome."
~William Ewart Gladstone
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