A book must be

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

-Kafka

Don't Turn Away from the Art of Life

"We enter the bookstore, see the many volumes arrayed there, and think: so much to read, so little time. But books do not take time; they give time, they expand our resources of both heart and mind. It may sound paradoxical, but they are, in the last analysis, scientific, for they trace the far flung route by which we come to understand our world and ourselves. They take our measure. And we are never through discovering who we are."

Arnold Weinstein, NY Times opinion, Don't Turn Away from the Art of Life

Reading Honest

"Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began." — John Dufresne

Forgotten

"Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer
say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the
first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first
images, the echo of words we think we have left behind,
accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our
memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books
we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or
forget - we will return. For me those enchanted pages will
always be the ones I found among the passageways of the
Cemetery of Forgotten Books." -The Shadow of the Wind

Read

• Luke, aged 13: Why do you think it's so important that young people read?
• Philip Pullman: For the same reason that I think it's important that they breathe, eat, drink, sleep, run about, fool around, and have people who love and look after them. It's part of what makes us fully human. Some people manage to get through life without reading; but I know that if I'd had to do that, an enormous part of my mind, or my soul if you like, would be missing. No one should be without the chance to let their soul grow.